This article argues that bank supervision sits at the center of two foundational tensions in the governance of American finance. The first is the extent to which the financial system is controlled by public actors (i.e., the government) or private actors (i.e., the banks). The second is the...

The Lehman / Barclay’s / Bloomberg Aggregate Bond Index dates to the 1970s. Historical back tests of investment strategies and outcomes that extend past 1973 have had to use either long bonds or short Treasuries. In terms of capturing returns over a complete market cycle, both long and short...

Using new quarterly U.S. data for the past 120 years, I show that sudden reversals in equity and credit market sentiment approximated by several measures of corporate securities issuance are highly predictive of banking crises and recessions. Deviations in equity issuance from historical...

The rise of the "New History of Capitalism" as a subfield of historical studies has magnified differences between economists and historians which started to grow during the 1970s. We describe what is and what is not new about the New History of Capitalism and explain how the different...

Does the concept of General Purpose Technologies help explain periods of faster and slower productivity advance in economies? The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to...

Inclusivity is perhaps the single most important human need to facilitate and demonstrate fairness for all members in an open and free society. When this principle need is compromised by appearances of unscrupulous self-interested privileged elites to perpetuate a systemic widening disparity...

Th is chapter explains an important, yet often misunderstood exception to the TRIPS requirement that a compulsory license must be issued predominantly for domestic use (except where issued to address anticompetitive conduct). It assumes an understanding of the usual compulsory licensing...

There is widespread concern about the effect of the Uruguay Round policy changes on world agricultural prices and consequently upon the welfare of developing countries. Assessing welfare changes with the standard terms of trade effect calculation can be misleading for distorted economies, since...

We investigate whether greater microeconomic flexibility facilitates the process of creative destruction in the context of new trade models with heterogeneous firms (Bernard et al., 2003 and Melitz, 2003). In these models, freer trade increases aggregate productivity because high-efficiency...

An intertemporal general equilibrium model of the United States and MERCOSUR is created to analyze the dynamic adjustments in both regions' commodity and capital markets after trade liberalization. Simulation results show that tariff reductions initiated by MERCOSUR have small positive effects...