Purpose – The purpose of this postmortem is to assess whether the design, implementation, and maintenance of financial policies during the period from 1996 through 2006 were primary causes of the financial system's demise. Design/methodology/approach – To draw conclusions about the policy...

We provide the first assessment of whether an intensification of product market competition reduces the racial wage gap exactly where taste-based theories predict that competition will reduce labor market discrimination. in economies where employers have strong racial prejudices. We use bank...

In this paper, we critically review the literature on finance and inequality, highlighting substantive gaps in the literature. Finance plays a crucial role in the preponderance of theories of persistent inequality. Unsurprisingly, therefore, economic theory provides a rich set of predictions...

We use the cross-state, cross-time variation in bank deregulation across the U.S. states to assess how improvements in banking systems affected the labor market opportunities of black workers. Bank deregulation from the 1970s through the 1990s improved bank efficiency, lowered entry barriers...

This paper explores the similarity of the underlying economic problems that lead to the establishment of (a) independent central banks to operate national monetary policies and (b) independent regulatory agencies for telecommunications and other utility service industries. We show that, in both...