China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

Charles Mackay's book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" enjoys extraordinarily high renown in the financial industry and among the press and the public. It also has an extraordinarily low reputation among historians.This paper argues that Mackay's sins of commission...

The British Railway Mania of the 1840s was by many measures the greatest technology mania in history, and its collapse was one of the greatest financial crashes. It has attracted surprisingly little scholarly interest. In particular, it has not been noted that it provides a convincing...

The insurance industry plays an important role for European economic stability and the threats and opportunities it faces should be carefully determined. In this paper we highlight the main challenges by using a Political, Economic, Social and Technological (PEST) analysis. This work applies...

This paper examines the impact of both bank- and market-based financial development on economic growth in South Africa during the period from 1980 to 2012. Unlike some previous studies, the current study employs means-removed average to construct both bank- and market-based financial development...

Initially, voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty...

Initially, voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty...

Voting rights were initially limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development, as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the riskiness...

We study the success and failure of 59 newly established (“nascent”) stock markets since 1975 in their first 40 years of activity. Nascent markets differ markedly in their success, as measured by number of listings, market capitalization, and trading activity. Long-term success is in part...

Many Caribbean financial systems are relatively well developed for their size but benefits are concentrated in a small part of the population. In several large countries, the financial development levels are below what is warranted by that country's own macroeconomic fundamentals. SMEs, in...