This paper addresses the question of whether growth convergence can be sustained in the global economy without compromising welfare and without causing major crises. It employs a simplified stock-flow analytical framework to examine the proposition that the pace and pattern of global growth is...

Many books on the 2008 financial crisis and the current recession focus on the financial sector. Unlike them, this book takes the real economy as the starting point and it situates the downturn within the societal context over the last several decades. Important elements of the story include...

Asset market efficiency fosters rational decisions on allocating resources, both individually and socially, and thus helps determine individuals' wealth accumulation and nations' economic growth. To date, however, there are little systematic data available for, and even less analysis of, US...

I study the returns to investments in durable assets since the start of the twentieth century. These assets are generally characterized by relatively low capital gains and substantial price fluctuations. The rate of value appreciation has been more pronounced for collectibles, but transaction...

This paper traces the roots of collateral flow and its potential vulnerabilities in the shadow banking system to their regulatory capital treatment in the banking sector. As part of assessing the interaction of banking regulation and the shadow banking sector, it investigates the impact of bank...

Qatar and Dubai have established financial centres which have been based upon the common law jurisdiction of England and Wales because of the advantages such a system can give to the development of their respective financial services industries. The Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) and the Dubai...

The objective of this paper is to examine the absolute and risk-adjusted effects on distribution rates and total wealth created by adding loss-limiting trend following strategies to buy and hold portfolios. Using 150 years of equity and bond data, we found that applying trend following to...

This paper traces the origin and development of the complex systems theory over the course of history, up to its latest advancement in the study of stock market crashes. The trail of the theory's fuzzy evolution is expansive that covers the ground of the complexity epistemology, natural science...

From the dawn of civilization, the ever-growing sophistication of human society, division of labour, specialization, and comparative advantage rendered trade an indispensable part of any human enterprise. The need for trade begets the need for finance, and as trade becomes globally...

It is often thought that the arrival of the Black Scholes Merton (BSM) model of option pricing in the early 1970s allowed traders to understand how to price and value options with greater precision. Yet, our study suggests that interwar commodity option traders may have been able to intuit...