Following the financial crisis, the view became widespread that IFRS, because it is based on a so-called incurred-loss approach, led to significant overstatements of financial assets by placing tight restrictions on the recognition of loan losses. As a result, the IASB undertook a project to...

At first glance, American insurance history is Whiggish, the story of self-insured risks slowly becoming managed by intermediaries. A closer look reveals more complexity, many directions of change, and numerous questions of importance today. Why, for example, did mutual life insurers wax and...

All governments have an obligation to protect their territory and the wealth within that territory from external predation. In fact, since war has historically resulted in the plunder and destruction of wealth, it seems straightforward to suggest that the cost of providing adequate defense of...

Economic sanctions and covert actions from hegemonic states are common tools used to influence other countries. Less is known about non-state actors such as banks and their impact across borders. We use new firm-level data from Chile to document a substantial decrease in financial relations with...

I subject some aspects of Roosevelt's "New Deal" to critical analysis, with particular attention to what is termed "liberal democracy". This analysis demonstrates the limits to reform, given the power of "vested interests" as articulated by Thorstein Veblen. While progressive economists and...

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a high interest rate in...

In 1841 and 1842, eight states and the Territory of Florida defaulted on their sovereign debts. Traditional histories of the default crisis have stressed the causal role of the depression that began with the Panic of 1837, unexpected revenue shortfalls from canal and bank investments as a result...

The market for U.S. Treasury securities is a marvel of modern finance. In 2009 the Treasury auctioned $8.2 trillion of new securities, ranging from 4-day bills to 30-year bonds, in 283 offerings on 171 different days. By contrast, in the decade before World War I, there was only about $1 billion...

Since its peak in the Middle Ages, the Islamic world has lost its prominent place among the great civilisations. Indeed, the scientific and industrial revolutions took place in Western Europe between the XVIIth and the XIXth centuries, and not in the Muslim world, while the free-market...