This would seem an opportune moment to reshape banking systems in the Americas. But any effort to rethink and improve banking must acknowledge three major barriers. The first is a crisis of vision: there has been too little consideration of what kind of banking system would work best for...

Economists' principal explanations of the subprime crisis differ from those developed by noneconomists in that the latter see it as rooted in the US legacy of racial/ethnic inequality, and especially in racial residential segregation, whereas the former ignore race. This paper traces this...

Recent empirical work on financial structure and economic growth analyzes multi-country dataset in panel and/or cross-section frameworks and concludes that financial structure is irrelevant. We highlight their shortcomings and re-examine this issue utilizing a time series and a Dynamic...

Demographic and institutional elements as important drivers of the housing market should not be neglected since it is not only financial and monetary elements that matter in the case of the housing market. In this context, one relationship, which still remains unclear, is the relationship...

This paper explores some of the links between macroeconomic policy and industrial strategy. The perspective of the present paper is to emphasis the role of the output and investment activities of enterprises rather than the general focus on the labour market in the determination of economic...

This paper traces the history and the institutional background of European integration to the establishment of the economic and monetary union in the European Union (EU). After the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC) in the late 1950s, attempts at monetary integration, and...

In this paper, the author aims to question the assumptions underlying the economic case for the independent European Central Bank (ECB) and argues that although a European Clearing Agency (ECA) of the type Keynes envisaged for the international economy is not a panacea for the economic problems...