This paper examines government policies aimed at rescuing banks from the effects of the financial crisis of 2007-2009. To delimit the scope of the analysis, we concentrate on the fiscal side of interventions and ignore, by design, the monetary policy reaction to the crisis. The policy response...

The ultimate point of origin of the great financial crisis of 2007-2009 can be traced back to an extremely indebted US economy. The collapse of the real estate market in 2006 was the close point of origin of the crisis. The failure rates of subprime mortgages were the first symptom of a credit...

The historical record shows that financial crises are far from being a rare a phenomenon; they occur often enough to be considered part of the workings of finance capitalism. While there is no single hypothesis that can best explain all crises, the implications of the credit boom-and-bust...

This paper examines government policies aimed at rescuing banks from the effects of the great financial crisis of 2007-2009. To delimit the scope of the analysis, we concentrate on the fiscal side of interventions and ignore, by design, the monetary policy reaction to the crisis. The policy...

Financial products are unstandardized and subject to a great deal of uncertainty. They tend to concentrate geographically because of the reduction in information costs resulting from close contacts. Concentration leads to economies of scale and encourages external economies. Great financial...

This paper examines government policies aimed at rescuing banks from the effects of the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Governments responded to the crisis by guaranteeing bank assets and liabilities and by injecting fresh capital into troubled institutions. We employ event study methodology to...

The current international monetary system (IMS) is fragile because the dollar standard is rapidly deteriorating. The dual role the dollar as the dominant international money and national money cannot be easily reconciled because the US monetary authorities face a conflict between pursuing...

In contrast to Robert Mundell's Optimum Currency Area theory and his recommendation of forming a monetary union, the economic fundamentals of Euro area member countries have not harmonized. The opposite holds: the Euro core countries - most of all Germany, but also the Netherlands and Finland -...

National borders are a big hurdle to the expansion of the open economy. Integration today remains imperfect because national borders translate into trading costs, including differences in monetary regimes. Political borders shelter many goods and services from external competition and,...

This chapter offers a selective survey of the gravity equation (GE) in international trade. This equation started in the Sixties as a purely empirical proposition to explain bilateral trade flows, without little or no theoretical underpinnings. At the end of the Seventies, the GE was...