Monetary Versus Macroprudential Policies: Causal Impacts of Interest Rates and Credit Controls in the Era of the UK Radcliffe Report We have entered a world of conjoined monetary and macroprudential policies. But can they function smoothly in tandem, and with what effects? Since this policy cocktail has not been seen...
Banking Crises and Economic Recoveries: Post-War and Inter-War Evidence This paper examines the time-profile of the impact of systemic banking crises on GDP and industrial production using a panel of 24 countries over the inter-war period and compares this to the post-war experience of these countries. We show that banking...
The Dark Side of Social Capital? Battles and Mortgage Lending I study how a shock in culture and trust in the past still affects mortgage lending today. More specifically, I investigate the long run effects of the American Civil War, a defining event for culture in American history, on current...
Pre-industrial money markets: a functional and comparative approach. Financial history has a strong teleological bent. Pre-industrial finance is often depicted as haphazard and deficient, because lacking strong, modern institutions like joint-stock banks or stock exchanges. By contrast, a comparison of the Dutch Republic with the Southern Netherlands over the period...
The Economic Effects of Long-Term Climate Change: Evidence from the Little Ice Age Recent studies have consistently found important economic effects of year-to-year weather fluctuations. This paper studies the economic effects of long-term and gradual climate change, over a period of 250 years, when people have time to adapt. In...
News Media and Stock Market Returns over the Long Run Does the news media affect financial markets? In this paper, we examine the relationship between the content of the Financial Times (FT) and daily returns on the London Stock Exchange for the period 1899– 2010. To do this, we convert...
The Local Impact of Containerization This paper exploits the advent of containerization, a technological shock that dramatically reduced international shipping costs, to examine how access to international markets affects local economic growth. We contend with the non-random adoption of containerization by employing a novel instrument: being near a very deep...
