The return to economic liberalism in the Anglo-Saxon world was motivated by the apparent failure of Keynesian economic management to control the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s. In this context, the theories of economic liberalism, championed by Friederich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and...

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...

How have credit markets evolved in the long-run around the world? I present evidence based on a novel sectorally disaggregated dataset on credit to the private sector for 120 countries for 1940-2014, as well as new series on total credit going back to 1910. Over the last 50 years, household...

Did financial development and international trade reinforce each other and drive economic growth more than a century ago? We investigate these linkages among 17 countries during the first wave of economic globalization (1850-1929). Cross-country dynamic panels as well as VARs and VECMs for...

We analyze cyclical co-movement in credit, house prices, equity prices, and long-term interest rates across 17 advanced economies. Using a time-varying multi-level dynamic factor model and more than 130 years of data, we analyze the dynamics of co-movement at different levels of aggregation and...

At a time of such great turbulence, looking to the future directions of capital markets and their regulation in developed economies is a particularly risky business. We are in the midst of a great sea change.Nevertheless, there are several current, and readily observable, phenomena which are...

This paper reviews the research literature concerning financial repression. The paper then presents an empirical measure for financial repression in the US banking system entitled “The Financial Repression Index,” drawing upon public data going back to the early 1980s The paper draws some...

The governance of infrastructure institutions in the financial markets – namely exchanges, central counter-parties (CCPs), and central securities depositories (CSDs) – has become a matter of significant commercial, regulatory, legislative, and even political concern. Such institutions play a...

We attempt to identify and explain the broad patterns of financial development in developed countries over the twentieth century. We find that, contrary to the predictions of most existing theories, indicators of financial development do not seem monotonic over time. In particular, we find that...

The results of deliberations in multilateral fora are often considered as ineffective. Decision making in the European Union (EU) and in particular its key intergovernmental body, the European Council, poses no exception. Especially in the domain of EU foreign and security affairs the unanimity...