In this paper, we document the fact that countries that have experienced occasional financial crises have, on average, grown faster than countries with stable financial conditions. We measure the incidence of crisis with the skewness of credit growth, and find that it has a robust negative...

In this paper we re-evaluate the hypothesis that the development of the financial sector was an essential factor behind economic growth in 19th century Germany. We apply a structural VAR framework to a new annual data set from 1870 to 1912 that was initially recorded by Walther Hoffmann (1965)....

Eine Kreditklemme der privaten Firmen trägt nach Meinung von Frank Westermann, Ph.D., Universität München, zu der derzeitigen Verlangsamung des Wirtschaftswachstums in Deutschland bei. Insbesondere kleinere Firmen sind hiervon betroffen, während große Firmen verstärkt alternative...

Eine Kreditklemme der privaten Firmen trägt nach Meinung von Frank Westermann, Ph.D., Universität München, zu der derzeitigen Verlangsamung des Wirtschaftswachstums in Deutschland bei. Insbesondere kleinere Firmen sind hiervon betroffen, während große Firmen verstärkt alternative...

In this paper we characterize empirically the comovements of macro variables typically observed in middle income countries, as well as the boom-bust cycle that has been observed during the last two decades. We find that many countries that have liberalized their financial markets, have witnessed...

The analogy between the economic problems of the Mezzogiorno region and East Germany has been initially contested by many authors. This paper argues that there are striking similarities in the two regions, in terms of the causes of their economic predicament. With an aggregate labour...