This paper examines whether financial intermediaries have played a leading role in influencing India's economic performance. After describing the evolution and functions of the financial sector, we construct a set of vector autoregressive and vector error correction models to evaluate the...

The Panic of 1837 stands among the most severe banking crises in U.S. history, marking the start of a business downturn from which the nation would not recover for six years. Given the serious consequences of the panic for the rapidly evolving commercial and industrial sectors, it is thus not...

Using 114 years of U.S. stock market data we try to relate movements in stock prices to changes in technology. We find measures of technological progress explain 37% of the 3.9% annual growth in the stock market over the 1885-1998 period, the "Jazz-Age" (1918-1934) entrants were not overvalued,...

We model merger waves as reallocation waves, and argue that mergers spread new technology in a way that is similar to that of the entry and exit of firms. We focus on two periods: 1890-1930, during which electricity and the internal combustion engine spread through the U.S. economy, and...

The authors find that supply risk in the market for Treasury bills adds between 10 basis points and 40 basis points to the standard deviation of the T-bill interest rate. The risk will probably increase unless the Fed expands the set of assets that it uses to conduct open market operations.

Using two newly available datasets of exchange-listed firms in China covering the period from 1994 to 2003, we test if share-issue privatization, defined here as a change of corporate control from the State to private owners rather than the IPO event used in earlier studies, improved firm...

The term "new economy" has, more than anything, come to mean a technological transformation, and in particular its embodiment in the computer and the internet. These technologies are more human capital intensive than earlier ones and have probably hastened the pace of the shift in the U.S....