In 1873, Denmark, Norway and Sweden formed the Scandinavian Currency Union (SCU) and adopted the gold standard. The Union worked fairly smoothly during the next thirty years and was partly extended until 1914. The outbreak of World War I triggered a series of events that eventually would lead to...

Contrary to received wisdom, some recent studies report a negative relationship between leverage and profitability in banking in the 1980s and early 1990s. This study presents new data on the leverage and profitability of Swedish commercial banks in 1870–2001, and explores the sign of the...

This paper applies theories and methods from modern economics and finance to new sets of historical financial data in order to study the integration and efficiency of the Scandinavian foreign exchange market. Series of the monthly prices of sight sterling bills have been collected and subjected...

This Paper examines monetary cooperation among the Scandinavian central banks during the union period. In 1885, the Scandinavian Currency Union was strengthened by the adoption of a clearing agreement. The agreement was proposed by the Danish Nationalbank, with the aim of improving the...

Does the combination of inflation and high corporate taxes explain the increase in bank leverage in the 20th century? Inflation automatically increases bank debt, while high corporate taxes hinder capital accumulation. Capital ratios therefore drop, until leverage-induced returns are sufficient...

This paper studies the effects of financial liberalization and banking crises on growth. It shows that financial liberalization spurs on average economic growth. Banking crises are harmful for growth, but to a lesser extent in countries with open financial systems and good institutions. <p> The...</p>

Economic growth in Cambodia came to an abrupt halt in 1997 as the home made political crisis and the external financial crisis took their toll. However, Cambodia has been comparatively mildly affected by the Asian crisis and provided that political stability can be achieved there are good...

Six years after the Revolution and despite half a century of sacrifices for a better future Romania remains impoverished and much further behind Western Europe in terms of economic development than it was before the Second World War. Against this backdrop the study takes stock of the situation...

This paper contains a survey of univariate models of conditional heteroskedasticity. The classical ARCH model is mentioned, and various extensions of the standard GARCH model are highlighted. This includes the Exponential GARCH model. Stochastic volatility models remain outside this review.

In this paper we test for existence of cointegration between health expenditure and GDP using data from 19 OECD countries for the period 1960-1995. Country-by-country and panel results based on the Johansen multivariate likelihood-based inference and a new panel test for cointegration rank are...