A nascent literature explores the measurement of financial fragility. This paper considers evidence for rising financial fragility during the 1984–2007 Great Moderation in the U.S. The literature suggests that macroeconomic stability combined with strong growth of credit to asset markets, in...

During the Great Moderation, financial innovation in the US increased the size and scope of credit flows supporting the growth of wealth. We hypothesize that spending out of wealth came to finance a wider range of GDP components such that it smoothed GDP. Both these trends combined would be...

Summary Throughout history, agriculture-led development strategies with state support programs have been essential to achieving rapid economy-wide growth, poverty reduction, and structural transformation. Yet over the last three decades, the domestic and international policy environments have...

Although Africa’s indigenous systems of slavery have been extensively described in the historical literature, comparatively little attention has been paid to analyzing its long term impact on economic and political development. Based on data collected from anthropological records we conduct an...

<Para ID="Par1">In contemporary research, it is common to measure growth-enhancing financial development by the volume of credit as a ratio of the gross domestic product (GDP), an application of Schumpeter’s theory of credit and development. Recently, researchers have been surprised to find a negative...</para>

This vital new Handbook is an authoritative volume presenting key issues in finance that have been widely discussed in the financial markets but have been neglected in textbooks and the usual compilations of conventional academic wisdom.