The dissertation includes four studies broadly connected to the causes and consequences of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8 from a political economy perspective. Following the intro-duction, Chapter 2 analyzes the political roots of massive foreign reserves accumulation, which has...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...