This paper provides a new interpretation of the early rise of rating agencies in the United States (initially known as Mercantile Agencies). We explain this American exceptionality through an inductive approach that revisits the conventional parallel with the UK. In contrast with earlier...

The Eurozone today is going into the same deflationary situation that the U.S. did under Jackson's destruction of the Second Bank, and the post-Civil War budget surpluses that deflated the economy. But whereas the Fed's creation was designed to inflate the U.S. economy, Europe's European Central...

In this study, I investigate the performance of five categories of U.S. domestic equity mutual funds during the recessions of 1990 and 2001 and during the 12 months following each recession. I show that recessions identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) are not all the same...

This paper analyzes and explains the disparate paths of development among venture capital organizations in the United States and Germany over the post-World War II period, contrasting the early emergence and burgeoning of the sector in the U.S. with the lagging development in Germany. The...

Research on "trust" now forms a prominent part of the research agenda in history and the social sciences. Although this research has generated useful insights, the idea of trust has been used so widely and loosely that it risks creating more confusion than clarity. This essay argues that to the...