The Great War of 1914-18 constituted a major rupture for the economies of Europe in several respects. It marked the end of almost a century of uninterrupted economic growth. It ended a long period of near-universal currency stability, and set in motion a painful process of de-globalisation. It...

Economic institutions encompassing increasingly sophisticated concepts of risk-sharing and liability flourished in Europe since the High Middle Ages. These innovations occurred in an environment of fragmented local jurisdictions, not within the framework of the territorial state. In this short...

The travel of small facts (such as data) across geographicallocations and disciplines is increasingly regulated by the private andpublic sponsors of digital databases. My analysis focuses on thecontrast between the strategies supported by the public and privatesectors in governing bioinformatic...

In this paper we use insights from organizational economics and financialregulation to study the optimal architecture of supervision. We suggest that thenew architecture should revolve around the following principles: (i) banking,securities and insurance supervision should be further integrated;...

This paper investigates whether the industrial relations climate inIndian states has affected the pattern of manufacturing growthin the period 1958-92. We show that states which ammendedthe Industrial Disputes Act in a pro-worker direction experiencedlowered output, employment, investment and...

[...]The most obvious possible, and undesirable,impact on bank behaviour of risk-weighted capital requirementsis that excessive differentials in the weights appliedto different categories of assets might induce banks to substituteaway from highly risk-weighted assets. In the early1990s, U.S....