This paper attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private...

This paper explains both the onset of the financial crisis in 1998 and the striking economic recovery afterwards in Russia and other Former Soviet Union (FSU) economies. Before the crisis banks do not lend to the real sector of the economy and firms use non-bank finance, including trade credits...

Macroeconomic adjustment in the euro area periphery was more recessionary than pre-crisis imbalances would have warranted. To make this claim, this paper uses a Propensity Score Matching Model to produce counterfactuals for the Eurozone crisis countries (Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus, Spain)...

We investigate the effects of economic crises on the subsequent economic performance, economic reform, democratization and institutional change. Our analysis is based on a sample of post-communist countries, most of which experienced severe economic crises during the 1990s. We find that the...

Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of human from Africa tens of...

The growing finance wage premium is related to a modest net reallocation of skilled workers from non-finance sectors into finance in a broad sample of 24 countries over 35 years. The reallocation is higher when the finance wage premium grows faster than the contribution of the financial sector...

In our article we review the secular stagnation hypothesis, firstly postulated by Hansen (1939), to describe the current macroeconomic dynamics faced by developed economies. Based in the existing literature, we elaborate on a workable definition of secular stagnation founded on four pillars:...

Occasional crises have been shown to be part of growth enhancing mechanism (see Rancière, Tornell and Westermann, 2008). In this paper, we document that neither the stereotypical case study of India vs. Thailand, nor the benchmark growth-regression in this earlier research support this result...

We propose a theoretical framework to reconcile episodes of V-shaped and L-shaped recovery, encompassing the behaviour of the U.S. economy before and after the Great Recession. In a DSGE model with endogenous growth, negative demand shocks destroy productive capacity, moving GDP to a lower...