I describe the challenge of fully integrating securities markets in Europe by integrating the clearing and settlement functionalities. The initial condition is characterized by a multitude of standards, conventions, regulation and laws, which are inconsistent with a barrier-free post-trading...

As barriers to international investment fall and technology improves, the cost advantages for a firm's securities to trade publicly in the country in which that firm is located and for that country to have a market for publicly traded securities distinct from the capital markets of other...

Contemporary bank governance is criticized for manager-dominated (insider) boards of directors, but from the beginning of the nineteenth century, bank presidents appear also to have operated as chairmen of the boards of directors. However, the managers were constrained by a variety of rules that...

EU financial safety nets are social contracts that assign uncertain benefits and burdens to taxpayers in different member countries. To help national officials to assess their taxpayers' exposures to loss from partner countries, this paper develops a way to estimate how well markets and...

We investigate the causes and consequences of financial regulation by studying the political economy of U.S. state usury laws in the 19th century. We find evidence that usury laws were binding and enforced and that lending activity was affected by rate ceilings. Exploiting the heterogeneity...

We develop a model of investment with financial constraints and use it to investigate the relation between investment and Tobin's q. A firm is financed partly by insiders, who control its assets, and partly by outside investors. When their wealth is scarce, insiders earn a rate of return higher...

The Chinese capital market, despite its relative short history in its modern form, has experienced a tremendous growth and is now the second largest in the world. Due to China's tight capital controls, the development of its capital market has mostly been isolated from and hence not been well...

Conventional wisdom has it that global financial markets were as well integrated in the 1890s as in the 1990s, but that it took several post-war decades to regenerate the connections that existed before 1914. This view has emerged from a variety of tests for world financial capital market...

Conventional wisdom has it that global financial markets were as well integrated in the 1890s as in the 1990s, but that it took several post-war decades to regenerate the connections that existed before 1914. This view has emerged from a variety of tests for world financial capital market...

Accounting for the pervasive evidence of limited international risk sharing is an important hurdle for open-economy models, especially when these are adopted in the analysis of policy trade-offs likely to be affected by imperfections in financial markets. Key to the literature is the evidence,...