In the last dozen years, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country’s laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes. Much of this research has dealt with rules...

There is no doubt that both internal and external regulation of banks will need to be coordinated, but the main responsibility for effective regulation of banks and financial institutions lies within these institutions themselves. However, internal regulation needs to be backed up by effective...

This article examines the spread of financialization in Germany before the financial crisis. It provides an up-to date overview on the literature on financialization and reviews which of the phenomena typically associated with financialization have emerged in Germany. In particular, the article...

This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms.The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...

A series of scandals in the financial services sector over the past twelve years has inspired concerted legislative action to protect customer interests. The Future of Financial Advice, Stronger Super, Protecting Consumers and Member Outcomes initiatives have each sought to reform the duties of...

The legal origins hypothesis is one of the most important and influential ideas to emerge in the social sciences in the past decade. However, the empirical base of the legal origins claim has always been contestable, as it largely consists of cross-sectional datasets which provide evidence on...

This study re-examines the theory of legal origin on the basis of a new longitudinal dataset on creditor protection for four OECD countries over a long time span 1970-2005. It observes that civil law countries (France and Germany) provided a higher level of protection to creditors on the issue...

The financial crisis introduced a new phrase into the banking industry's lexicon - "too big to fail." "Too big to fail" describes financial institutions so important to the financial markets that their collapse or bankruptcy would disrupt the capital markets in such catastrophic ways that it...