The macroeconomics of ‘financialisation’

Financial market developments have become increasingly important to the overall economic development in virtually all countries in the world over the past three decades or so. The arti-cles collected in this Thesis constitute an attempt to explore this ‘financialisation hypothesis’ from a macroeconomic perspective. The theoretical parts of the Thesis (in particular chapters III-V) are inspired by (Post) Keynesian macroeconomics and modern information economics. It also complements the interdisciplinary political economy literature on financialisation, in which the macroeconomic perspective has so far been clearly underdeveloped in (chapter II). Finally, the Thesis also comprises empirical (econometric) analyses (mainly in chapters II and VI, and in an Appendix), with a particular focus on the US economy, where the process of financialisation is very advanced.