The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a regulatory agency of the United States government with a mandate to make "consumer financial products and services work for Americans". A direct response to the recent financial crisis, the creation of the CFPB in 2010 marks an important...

Housing a ffordability broadly refers to the cost of housing services and shelter - both for renters and owner occupiers - relative to a given individual's or household's disposable income. While there is no universal definition for this term, housing affordability is an easy concept to grasp in...

The recent financial crisis has been a powerful reminder that the intersectoral flow of funds is also -- always and everywhere -- a local phenomenon with real effects. Yet, the contemporary canon of regional economic theory has enshrined the classical dichotomy, treating the spheres of money and...

This review assesses the evolution of economic geography over the past two decades, picking up where Scott's (2000) intellectual history of the field's “great-half century” ends. It is part retrospective and prospective; as such, it aims beyond a historical review to outline some ideas about...

»The Formation of Business Cycle Research in the Early 20th Century«: The formation of research on macroeconomic fluctuations in the early 20th century was characterised by a debate on key questions: is the business cycle a problem of applied economic theory, or does it require a fundamentally...

This paper assesses the effect of Richard Florida's creative class on economic growth and development at two levels of spatial aggregation. First, I examine the dynamics of economic growth across US metropolitan regions and investigate how they relate to regional specialization and the...

Since the Plaza Meeting in September 1985, G-10 central banks have intervened in foreign exchange markets in a manner and scale unprecedented in the post Bretton Woods era. Using official daily data on interventions by the Swiss National Bank, this paper evaluates the effectiveness of these...