Social capital is a key factor affecting the functioning of financial markets (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, 2004). However, the estimation of the effect of social capital on credit markets is notoriously difficult. In this paper we exploit the recent Lehman Brothers crisis and a rich dataset to...

On the 29 of June 2009, the Pope Benedict XVIth published Caritas in Veritate, his third encyclical letter. It was addressed to the clergy but also to “lay faithful and all people of good will”. In the two papers assembled here under one single title, the author enters in dialogue with the...

The main objective of this paper is to present a reading of The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin in the context of the financial crisis, in particular, reflect from a few fragments of Benjamin's work appear to lie around a Black Swan. The recovery of the fragments of The Arcades seems...

Die Wurzeln des im Rahmen der aktuellen Krise verlorenen Vertrauens sassen nicht tief. Im Gegenteil war auch das scheinbare Funktionieren der Finanzmaerkte gepraegt von einem tief sitzenden, kaschierten Vertrauensverlust und von einer tautologisch „begruendeten“ Vertrauensillusion....

In 1997 the new Labour government launched major initiatives in the area of financial regulation, setting up the Financial Services Authority as a comprehensive regulatory body, supported by the legislative framework of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. We evaluate the Labour...

"Everybody talks about financial innovation, but (almost) nobody empirically tests hypotheses about it." Frame and White (2004) The financial turmoil from 2007 onwards has spurred renewed debates on the "bright" and "dark" sides of financial innovation. Using bank-, industry- and country-level...

Purpose – The recurrence of banking crises throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and in the more recent 2008-09 global financial crisis, has led to an expanding empirical literature on crisis explanation and prediction. The purpose of this paper is to provide an analytical review of proxies for and...

A financial crisis leads to a debt overhang in the banking sector and subsequently to a credit crunch. In most cases, it is not possible to remedy this situation without economic policy measures. In this study, we use a uniform framework to analyze how banks in a crisis situation can be...