The origins of financial accounts in the United States and Italy: Copeland, Baffi and the institutions -- Private sector debt matters too: theoretical perspectives on credit and the building of financial accounts -- Household wealth in a cross-country perspective -- Should household wealth and...

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the financial systems of major industrialized countries using the statistical framework of the financial accounts. After a discussion of how economists agreed to create a framework to monitor the financial linkages between surplus and deficit sectors,...

The differences between financial structures are a key aspect of the literature investigating the link between finance and economic growth, where the direction of causality is hard to discern. The paper analyses the size of financial and real wealth, the role of intermediaries and markets, and...

Given the importance of banking intermediation, we investigate the determinants of the size of bank loans in 18 OECD countries in the period 1981-1997. The aim of the paper is to show that the ratio of government debt to GDP has a negative effect on the level of bank credit. Second, countries...

According to macroeconomic predictions firms are expected to be net borrowers: the net change of their financial assets should be smaller than the net change of their financial liabilities. However, since the mid-1990s, the non–financial sector has been on average a net lender in countries...