Did the city-states of Genoa and Venice kick a financial revolution all the way back in the Quattrocento, much sooner than the financial revolutions of the Netherlands, England and America? To answer this question we analyze the classic revolutions in terms of three key criteria: credibility of...

That the public sector has grown both in absolute terms and relative to the rest of the economy is an undisputable fact. That both growth rates have accelerated in recent history is also an unchallenged fact. More cautious must we be about why these trends have occurred and are persisting. We...

This paper presents two views of the European sovereign debt crisis. The first is that countries in the South of the Eurozone were fiscally irresponsible and failed to implement pro-competitive supply side policies. The second view holds that the crisis reflects a deep divide between the...

This paper examines government policies aimed at rescuing banks from the effects of the great financial crisis of 2007-2009. To delimit the scope of the analysis, we concentrate on the fiscal side of interventions and ignore, by design, the monetary policy reaction to the crisis. The policy...

Financial regulation has shifted from a system managed as an oligopoly dominated by the G2/G5 to expanded clubs like the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision. Expansive clubs have to agree to terms that are closer to the preferences of soft-regulation members. Yet, once a global agreement on...

This paper examines how banks around the world have resized and reallocated their earning assets in response to the subprime and sovereign debt crises. We also focus on the interaction between sovereign debt and the asset allocation process. We find that banks have readjusted asset shares and...