This study explores individual and country-level environmental drivers of informal “seed” investment. We examine four types of informal investors based on business ownership experience (or no such experience) and close family relationship with investee (or no such relationship): “classic love...

Was the London Stock Exchange (LSE) little more than a Dickensian den of speculation, or did itmake a contribution to industrial development in interwar Britain? The interwar stock marketlaboured under problems of weak disclosure, inadequate investor protection and ineffectiveunderwriting. New...

The remote inland province of Shanxi was late Qing dynasty China’s paramount banking center. Itsremoteness and China’s almost complete isolation from foreign influence at the time lead historiansto posit a Chinese invention of modern banking. However, Shanxi merchants ran a tea trade...

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die empirische Regelmäßigkeit, dass Faktorpreise, insbesondere Lohnniveaus, sich im Länderquerschnitt nicht anpassen. Die Studie bietet einen möglichen Erklärungsansatz: Ein allgemeines stochastisches Gleichgewichtsmodell mit monopolistischer Konkurrenz auf...

The G20 summits in 2009 have proposed major changes in governance of the InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF). Most important seems to be the acknowledgment that the IMF in itscurrent form lacks legitimacy and ownership. Accordingly, the G20 suggests a reallocation ofvoting shares to emerging and...

This paper analyzes the trade-off between official liquidity provision and debtor moral hazard ininternational financial crises. In the model, crises are caused by the interaction of bad fundamentals,self-fulfilling runs and policies by three classes of optimizing agents: international...

While virtually all currency crisismodels recognise that the fate of a currency peg depends onhow tenaciously policy makers defend it, they seldom model how this is done. We incorporatethemechanics of speculation and the interest rate defence against it in the model ofMorrisand Shin (American...

This paper shows that properly designed interest rate rules can be consistent withmaintaining exchange rate stability. It sheds light on the relation between interest rate rules,exchange rate regimes, and determinacy of the rational expectation equilibrium in a modernmacroeconomic framework.[...]