Building on the view that financial systems from contract and trading structures through regulation are artifacts of law and politics, this paper analyzes the fundamental reasons for the observed hierarchy in all financial systems. Why are financial systems hierarchical? The answer offered here...

The capitalist industrial society underwent profound changes after World War II. Although its political, economic and social structures were redesigned in the postwar period, they began to crumble again just two decades afterwards as a result of the liberal model crises, which badly affected the...

This paper discusses the three approaches within economic history that utilizes micro-economic theory to examine institutions, their nature, change, and efficiency: the Neo-classical Economics approach, the New Institutional Economic History approach, and Historical Institutional Analysis...

This paper discusses the three approaches within economic history that utilizes micro-economic theory to examine institutions, their nature, change, and efficiency: the Neo-classical Economics approach, the New Institutional Economic History approach, and Historical Institutional Analysis...

The core problem of both the Great Depression and the 2008/2009 economic crisis was deflation. A review of the Great Depression examines the long, slow intellectual and political process that finally led to a correct understanding of how deflation arose and the difficulty of addressing it with...

This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. We compile a new database of 220,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) and 2016, covering 91 countries. Our main insight is that, as in equity...

VC: An American History offers a compelling chronicle of the development of professional venture capital (VC) in the United States, from VC-like forebearers as diverse as 18th century cotton manufacturing and 19th century whaling up to the state of the modern VC market at the turn of the...

What is the connection between different forms of globalization, economic growth, and welfare? International trade, cross-border capital flows, and labor movements are three areas in which economic historians have focused their research. I critically summarize various measures of international...

The decline of British industry, along with monetarism, economic liberalization and the rise of the financial sector are popularly associated with the 1980s and Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. But British industry had already passed its peak nearly a century before. Unregulated...

Much has been written about the current crisis in the global financial system, and many thoughtful analyses have examined the causes and consequences of that crisis. This paper joins those analyses that argue that the crisis reveals flaws in the theoretical underpinnings of capital market...