In this paper we attempt to identify the characteristics of banks that are most likely to be at the origin of a banking crisis following a financial liberalization (FL) process. We do this analysis in response to the observed fact that FL processes arse often followed by banking crisis that cost...

This paper explores theoretically and empirically the link between Financial Liberalization (FL) and the banking crisis that often follow. We also investigate the proposition, classical in development economics, that FL should result in an increase in supply of funds to the real sector. To...

This paper uses long-run real price and dividends series to investigate for the German stock market the questions asked of the U.S. market by Shiller (1989). It tries to determine in what periods and to what degree the Germanstock market has also possessed "excess volatility" over the past...

Based on an original database, this paper provides an empirical study of Tsarist bond prices reactions after their repudiation by the Soviets. For the two years following the repudiation two striking features of a representative Tsarist bond traded in Paris are highlighted: first, the price...

Ireland's loan funds were a long lived, self-sustaining, large-scale microcredit organization that made millions of loans, without collateral, to the poor. We examine the life-cycle of this institution and show how the loan funds responded to their economic environment in ways that benefitted...

During the 52 years between the Unification of the Kingdom of Italy and World War 1, the lira was legally convertible into metal for a limited period of time. Although not formally committed to gold, the lira exchange towards the gold standard countries proved remarkably stable,...

Hundreds of independent, local, quasi-charitable microcredit societies, or "loan funds," were lending to as many as 20% of Irish households in the mid-nineteenth century. Monitored by a central regulatory authority, funds in the system were successful in mitigating informational, moral hazard...

This paper studies the Gold Standard in Portugal. It was the first country in Europe to join Great Britain in 1854. The principle of free gold convertibility was abandoned in 1891. For the purposes of a macroeconomic study, we also extended the analysis up to 1913. Our study points out the...

The present paper proposes to employ a major shift in the legal and institutional environment to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. We use the reform of the German stock companies act in 1884 as such a major shift and estimate the...

In this paper we show that the spread of the classical gold=20 standard in the late nineteenth century increased international trade=20 flows. This positive effect was compounded whenever a group of countries=20 formed a monetary union. Applying the gravity model of trade to more than=20 1,100...