This Economic Letter reviews both the supervisory concerns and the practices that have arisen in response to the expansion of outsourcing by financial services firms. Government supervisors have adopted general guidelines regarding how the inherent risks should be identified and mitigated. For...

Downturns in the construction and finance sectors played a significant role in the recent recession. A stock-market-based measure that captures sectoral shocks shows that these disturbances are important for explaining long-duration unemployment. This is consistent with the intuition that...

This Economic Letter presents recent research on a new explanation for both the export of savings and the import of equity by emerging countries: their level of underdevelopment of the financial sector compared to that of more advanced countries. Specifically, financial underdevelopment in...