More than half of the assets in China's banking system are accounted for by four huge state-owned commercial banks. This paper examines the changing factors influencing these banks' lending behavior over the post-1994 period on a province-by-province basis. Determinants include the concentration...

An examination of sovereign defaults over the long term, from 1294 to 2008, shows that serial defaults are far rarer than the much-ballyhooed experience of the 1980s suggests. the only mass default in Europe since 1294 took place in the early nineteenth century during the Napoleonic Wars. The...

Die Geldpolitik der Schweiz: die Unabhängigkeit der Zentralbank und ihre Stabilisierungsziele Von allen Zentralbanken der Welt erfreut sich die Schweizerische Nationalbank (SNB) wohl der größten Autonomie. Im Rahmen der OECD-Länder lag die Schweiz während der Periode 1960 – 83 in bezug...

During the Civil War the Arkansas legislature funded their expenditures primarily through interest-bearing warrants and war bonds. After these issues were made legal tender in November 1861, the discount attributed to them disappeared immediately and they began to circulate widely. By mid- 1862...

Post-2003 US pressure for Chinese currency appreciation has met with concerns regarding the possible impact on China's economic growth and vulnerable financial system. Such pressure was transmitted in a more tangible form in the 1930s under the post-1933 US silver purchase program. New empirical...

When faced with a liquidity trap, a traditional open market purchase will generally be ineffective. Theoretical studies have suggested that intervention in other markets could offer a means of escaping from this trap. We provide some empirical evidence on the importance of non-traditional open...

Post-1990 Chinese monetary policy is modeled with a McCallum-type rule that takes into account the People's Bank of China's emphasis on targeting the rate of money supply growth. People's Bank policy appears responsive to the gap between target and actual nominal GDP as well as to external...

Previous work found the racial composition of NBA teams to be positively correlated with the racial composition of their metropolitan markets in the 1980s.We find continued evidence of this relationship during the 1990s, with accompanying revenue gains from the inclusion of White players on...

The fate of the distressed debt issued by the 1836-1845 Republic of Texas has received surprisingly little attention. Annexation by the United States was almost certainly a necessary condition for the debt rising from the pennies-on-the-dollar values seen in the early 1840s. But the largest...

The very low interest rates and inflation rates of recent years has generated renewed interest in alternative policies that would not leave central banks trapped by the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. Amongst this debate, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the possibility...