The paper is a survey of theoretical and empirical approaches applied to analyze the impact of financial system on economic growth. The key issues of the modern theories of the finance-growth nexus are discussed and the theories are classified on the basis of the methodology they rely on. The...

The paper surveys the literature on the effects of finance on productivity growth. In both the theoretical and empirical literature, there is no consensus regarding the contribution of financial liberalization and financial development to growth. Focusing on the direct channels of growth, the...

This lecture revisits the evidence on the incidence and severity of different varieties of financial crises within the context of globalization then (pre-1914) and now (1980 to the present). I then discuss the determinants of emerging market crises from the perspective of the recent balance...

This paper analyzes the state and impact of financial literacy in a so far largely neglected group: the middle class in emerging economies. This group is of increasing importance for implementing structural change, including the proper use of sophisticated financial products. We survey middle...

The purpose of this study is to develop an efficient strategy for managing fixed-income portfolios in crisis periods. We use the volatility ratio model of Briere and Szafarz (2008) and the Expected Tail Loss (ETL) approach of Litzenberger and Modest (2008). Our methodology is applied to U.S. and...

Use of a promise to pay by a bank to insure an outstanding loan in order to return the value of the insured amount into capital for use in writing a new loan is an invention in banking with calculably greater potential economic impact than the original invention of reserve banking. The...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modelling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of...

The authors pick up the standard textbook approach of money creation and develop a simple agent-based alternative. They show that their model is well suited to explain the endogenous creation of money. Although more general, their model still contains the standard results as a limiting case. The...

In this paper the authors focus on credit connections as a potential source of systemic risk. In particular, they seek to answer the following question: how do we find densely connected subsets of nodes within a credit network? The question is relevant for policy, since these subsets are likely...

The Eurosystem has been pursuing a crisis management policy for more than four years now. This policy aims primarily at maintaining financial stability in the euro area by providing vast liquidity support to commercial banks that are operating in nationally segmented banking systems. As a side...