Increased globalization over the last two decades has led to strong growth in international business activity and international financial integration. This phenomenon covers a wide array of economic activities, including regional and international integration, investment and trade, international...

There is not an overwhelming case to be made that the Federal Reserve System (FRS) should be analyzed as a bureau instead of as a firm or set of firms. Accordingly, I discuss the formation of the FRS in relation to the framework developed by William Gartner for describing the phenomenon of new...

I review the original Monetary Commission's origins and contribution to the legislative effort that led to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act. My immediate purpose is that of identifying that Commission's merits and shortcomings, with the aim of informing the current effort to establish a...

In this paper we explore empirically a long-standing question in the literature on finance for growth, namely whether the financial structure -in terms of the size of the banking system relative to the capital market- matters for economic growth. We build upon the existing literature by...

Government interventions into the financial system in the form of bail out operations or liquidity assistance are often justified with the systemic importance of large banks for the real economy. In this paper, we test whether idiosyncratic shocks to loan growth at large banks have effects on...

We contribute to the post-crisis literature on macroeconomic stability by arguing that polycentric banking systems can better achieve stability than monocentric systems. Building on the theories of E. Ostrom, we engage the literature on free banking systems to show that these systems met the...