This paper utilizes data on the presence of prominent individuals-that is, those with political (e.g., Members of Parliament) and aristocratic titles (e.g., lords)--on the boards of directors of English and Welsh banks from 1879 - 1909 to investigate whether the appointment of well-connected...

Beginning in 2000, Japan's postal saving system experienced a rapid outflow of funds as a large number of 10-Year Postal Saving Certificates were maturing. This paper exploits this episode as a natural experiment in order to investigate the effects of a government-owned depository institution on...

This paper investigates how politics affect bank supervision by examining determinants of bank failures in Japan during 1999-2002, period during which bank regulators were called upon to resolve insolvent banks in preparation for the lifting of a blanket deposit guarantee. The empirical results...

The privatization of Japan's postal saving system, the world's largest financial institution, has been a politically charged issue since it first started being debated in the late 1980s. Analyzing the pre-election survey of the House of Representatives candidates in 2003 and also the voting...

This paper examines the impact of the Hoa, an ethnically Chinese, economically dominant minority, on regional economic development in Vietnam. To address the endogeneity of the geographical distribution of the Hoa, we use an important historical episode: the rapid deterioration in...

Does related lending have positive or negative effects on the development of banking systems? This paper analyzes a unique cross-country data set covering 74 countries from 1990 to 2007, and finds that related lending, on average, does not have any effect on the growth of credit. The authors do...

This paper exploits the international transmission of business cycles to examine the prevalence of attribution error in economic voting in a large panel of countries from 1990-2009. We find that voters, on average, exhibit a strong tendency to oust incumbent governments during an economic...