In the conventional CAPM model only a single risk factor is considered. However, using a world market portfolio to estimate systematic risk in national portfolios little of the required rate of return is explained in developing as compared to developed countries. Adding a factor representing...

This paper investigates the empirical link between fiscal vulnerabilities and currency crashes in advanced economies over the last 130 years, building on a new dataset of real effective exchange rates and fiscal balances for 21 countries since 1880. We find evidence that crashes depend more on...

I offer a simple framework to address why state intervention in the financial system, prevalent in less developed economies, yields various welfare outcomes, and why such conventional reforms as privatization and fiscal reforms prove insufficient to eliminate state intervention. In the model...

How does a major financial network innovation influence firm performance? Despite much speculation we have little hard quantitative evidence about the impact of technology diffusion in financial services. In this paper we use the entire adoption history for SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide...

The development of shared data processing networks and their consequences for new retail banking services from the 1960s to the 1980s in both Spanish and British savings banks are the topic of this research. Each of the two competitive environments responded in its own way to the processes of...

The literature on the equity premium vigorously debates how to measure the premium, what is its size and what determines its variation. This study provides a quantitative survey of the literature through a meta-analysis. We identify how the size of the equity premium depends on the way it is...

Economics has firms maximizing value and people maximizing utility, but firms are run by people. Agency theory concerns the mitigation of this internal contradiction in capitalism. Firms need charters, regulations and laws to restrain those entrusted with their governance, just as economies need...

The Kosovo’s Financial Sector is one of the newest financial sectors in Eastern Europe whose developments began in early 2000. Kosovo's banking sector consists of 8 privately owned commercial banks, the insurance companies which make up 5% of total financial sector assets by 10 insurance...

This paper analyses the architecture of the international monetary system which preceded the international gold standard (1844-1870). It builds on a newly-created database made up of more than 100,000 weekly observations on exchange rates, interest rates, and bullion prices in the world’s six...

Do external imbalances increase the risk of financial crises? In this paper, we study the experience of 14 developed countries over 140 years (1870-2008). We exploit our long-run dataset in a number of different ways. First, we apply new statistical tools to describe the temporal and spatial...