Financial innovations and crises: the view backwards from Northern Rock / Jeremy Atack -- An economic explanation of the early Bank of Amsterdam, debasement, bills of exchange and the emergence of the first central bank / Stephen Quinn and William Roberds -- With a view to hold: the emergence of...

The number of firm bankruptcies is surprisingly low in economies with poor institutions. We study a model of bank-firm relationship and show that the bank's decision to liquidate bad firms has two opposing effects. First, the bank gets a payoff if a firm is liquidated. Second, it loses the rent...

This paper estimates the impact of financial development on industry-level total factor productivity (TFP) growth using a largely unexploited panel of 77 countries with data for 26 manufacturing industries for the years 1963 to 2003. A significant relationship is found between financial...