Most scholars know little about the Panic of 1792, America's first financial market crash, during which securities prices dropped nearly 25 percent in two weeks. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton adroitly intervened to stem the crisis, minimizing its effect on the nascent nation's fragile...

This paper uses standard tools of empirical macro economics to examine how well the existing historical time series support a role for financial factors in real sector activity in four economies that experienced what are widely considered to be 'financial revolutions' over the past 400 years....

Recent cross-country investigations of the role of institutional fundamentals such as the protection of property rights in promoting financial development have extended a literature that has for decades maintained that financial factors can affect real outcomes. In this paper we pursue this new...

Although the finance-growth nexus has become firmly entrenched in the empirical literature, studies that question the strength of the empirical results have appeared and seem to have become more frequent as well. In this paper we reexamine the core crosscountry panel results that established the...

This paper focuses on innovation as a determinant of the rapid financial deepening that characterized the U.S. economy from 1872 to 1929. After describing the key innovations adopted by national banks in New York City over this period, it presents an example in which better loan monitoring in...

Although the finance-growth relationship is now firmly entrenched in the empirical literature, we show that it is not as strong in more recent data as it was in the original studies with data for the period from 1960 to 1989. We consider two related explanations. First, excessive financial...

The robustness of the cross-sectional relationship between the size of a country's financial sector and its rate of economic growth is by now well established. In this article, we examine whether the strength of this relationship varies with the inflation rate. Using five-year averages of...

Using two newly available datasets of listed firms covering the period from 1994 to 2003, we test if share-issue privatization, defined here as the change of corporate control from the State to private owners rather than the IPO event as in earlier studies, improved firm performance in China. To...

We examine investment behavior among exchange-listed Korean manufacturing firms before and after the 1997 financial crisis using firm-level panel data. We start with the standard Q-theory of investment, and then augment it by allowing for a sales accelerator and the possibility of cash...