This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of UK banking crises over the period 1750 to 1938. We construct a new annual banking crisis series using bank failure rate data, which suggests that the incidence of banking crises was every 32 years. Using our new series and a narrative approach...

This paper examines the response of five prominent Swedish economists, David Davidson, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Knut Wicksell and Bertil Ohlin, to John Maynard Keynes's "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" and to the German reparations in the 1920s. When Keynes's book appeared, Davidson...

This article explores the manipulation of published financial reports in order to counter perceived unfavourable impact, on an entity, of newly introduced regulations. The article departs from the traditional analysis of asset depreciation in manufacturing or mining and the link between market...

This article explores the manipulation of published financial reports in order to counter the potentially unfavourable impact of newly introduced regulation. In this case the reported capital ratio of a major building society was enhanced using a sale and leaseback transaction with a related...

The "law matters" thesis implies countries will not develop a robust stock market or diffuse corporate ownership structures unless laws are in place that curtail the extraction of private benefits of control by large shareholders and address information asymmetries from which outside investors...

Unlike Australia, which diversified its markets after 1950 (to the extent that Japan superseded Britain as Australia's foremost customer in the late 1960s), New Zealand remained dependent on outlets in the United Kingdom. New Zealand's reliance on the British market was a consequence of its...

Recent studies on real exchange rates advocate the use of long samples in order to reveal the low frequency properties of the processes. The present paper contributes to this strand of the literature by exploiting recently released time series for the drachma/sterling rate for the period...

While issues that prompt corporate governance responses are endemic to the corporate form, the term “corporate governance” only began to feature with any regularity in discussions of public companies in Britain as the 1990s got underway. It is well known that work done by the Committee on...

We study how relationships between firms and banks evolved since the end of the Nineteenth century until the end of the Twentieth century in Britain. We document and explain a remarkable shift from bilateral to multilateral relationship banking during this period, in particular during the last...

The massification of retail finance in the 1980s relied on the successful deployment of automated teller machines (ATM) and on-line real-time (OLRT) computing during the 1960s and 1970s. We document how the deployment of ATM networks interweaved with the adoption of OLRT computing in Sweden and...