An extensive literature praises economic integration and monetary unions as powerful means for economic convergence between, and the growth of, nations. Several potential factors have been flagged for successful economic convergence, such as labor availability and mobility and the role of...

We report a study of a stylized banking cascade model investigating systemic risk caused by counterparty failure using liabilities and assets to define banks' balance sheet. In our stylized system, banks can be in two states: normally operating or distressed and the state of a bank changes from...

The productivity performance of the UK economy in the period 1990-2007 was excellent. Based entirely on pre-crisis data, and using a two-sector growth model, I project the future growth rate of GDP per hour in the market sector to be 2.61% p.a. But the financial crisis and the Great Recession...

After a long period of economic divergence before 1914, the Portuguese economy recovered slightly until 1950, entering thereafter on a path of strong economic convergence. This paper focuses on Portuguese economic growth in the period 1950-1973 in order to show how institutional decisions...