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How have credit markets evolved in the long-run around the world? I present evidence based on a novel sectorally disaggregated dataset on credit to the private sector for 120 countries for 1940-2014, as well as new series on total credit going back to 1910. Over the last 50 years, household credit has risen dramatically not only in advanced but also emerging economies. Mortgage lending only accounts for part of the story: particularly in developing countries, consumer credit accounts for much of this growth. I show that corporate lending has essentially stalled relative to GDP since around 1980, which is not explained by the development of global bond markets, cross-border lending, or trade credit. While the main drivers are country-specific, the rise of household credit correlates with financial deregulation, information sharing institutions, demographic shifts, inequality, and legal frameworks.

Graduating high school improves wellbeing. It is important to understand how policy affects high school graduation. This paper studies the impact of bank branching deregulation on high school graduation. The use of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 geocoded data focuses the results on three deregulations: Ohio in 1979, Connecticut in 1980, and Alabama in 1981. Discontinuities in treatment assignment at borders between deregulated states and regulated states identify the effect of banking deregulation on high school graduation. Results indicate significant increases in the likelihood of high school graduation for treated individuals. Analysis provides evidence of heterogeneous effects of bank branching deregulation based on skill level and income level.

In this paper we present a new data set on bank credit in four categories: home mortgages, consumer credit, bank loans to non-bank financials, and loans to non-financial business, for 74 economies over 1990–2013. We offer a full description of sources and methods of data collection and construction and comparisons with adjacent data sets. We document key trends including the shift in bank credit allocation away from traditional business lending. The literature suggests substantial consequences of this 'debt shift' for growth, income distribution and macroeconomic resilience, which motivated this data construction. A second contribution is to analyze drivers of debt shift in fixed-effects and system-GMM regressions for the full sample and separately for advanced and emerging economies. We find that debt shift is larger in advanced economies with a stronger presence of foreign banks and higher trade. Financial deregulation strongly correlates with debt shift.

While a major overhaul of U.S. financial regulation may be unlikely during the early months of the Trump administration, changes should be expected as his nominees to lead the Treasury Department and financial regulatory agencies are confirmed. This will be the biggest turnover in regulatory leadership since the passage in 2010 of the Dodd-Frank Act, and it may prove to be a test for Basel III, the macroprudential policy framework created by the G20 countries in response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. This short paper describes what can be expected in the near future due to the changes in leadership in many of the regulatory agency.

Are there simple and observable aggregate statistics that might help determine and forecast the degree of wealth inequality? Do they explain the differences in wealth inequality across economies and over time? To answer these questions, we build a general equilibrium, neoclassical growth model, in which the stationary wealth distribution has heavy right tail with the Pareto tail index, Pt. In the simplest cases of the model, the tail index depends on interest rate (r), growth rate (g), aggregate labor income share (EY), and aggregate capital to output ratio, (KY), summarized in a formula Pt = Pt ( r,g,EY,KY) (rather than the simple gap r-g , put forth in Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the 21st century”). In addition, financial development, production technology, corporate and wealth taxes affect the tail index through their effects on these sufficient statistics. When we calibrate the model to the U.S. economy, we find that the model requires significant persistent heterogeneous returns to investment in order to generate the tail index of U.S. wealth distribution. In this calibration, earnings inequality and, to a lesser extent, initial wealth distribution have negligible effects on top end wealth inequality. The transition of the model economy after a uniform wealth destruction shock or changes in corporate tax (but not after a financial deregulation shock) produces the joint dynamics of EY, KY, and wealth inequality experienced in major developed economies after World War II. Lastly, we find empirical evidence for persistent heterogeneous returns in the PSID surveys.

Dodd-Frank is a sprawling law, many pieces of which are unrelated to any financial crisis — past or future. What unifies the disparate pieces is an unquestioning faith in regulatory omniscience and broad grants of power to these infallible regulators. The law calls on regulators to step in where the rest of us — individuals, firms, and nongovernmental institutions — are supposedly destined to fail, namely, to identify and address all systemic and a wide array of nonsystemic risks. In giving such heavy responsibilities to regulators, Dodd-Frank’s drafters overlooked the fact that precrisis regulators missed risks and that precrisis regulatory design contributed to the buildup of risk. By giving regulators an outsized role, Dodd-Frank suppresses the market’s intrinsic disciplining mechanisms and builds bailout expectations. Revisiting Dodd-Frank thus requires a marked change in perspective — a shift away from the comforting but ineffective “entrust the financial system to the skilled hands of the all-knowing regulators” approach to financial regulation, as well as a piece-by-piece substantive overhaul.

How did the deregulation of U.S. bank activities affect the patterns of cross-border lending to emerging economies? Unlike bank lending from Europe or Japan, U.S. bank lending to emerging economies exhibited increasing volatility over time. Using U.S. cross-border bank exposure data, this study identifies a temporal association between important deregulation initiatives and the volatility of U.S. bank emerging market lending. This association is explained by the linkages between an important outcome of bank deregulation－earnings volatility from diversified bank activities－and the rising volatility. Together, it argues that U.S. banking deregulation had unanticipated effects of exacerbating the volatility of bank lending to emerging economies.

Recently, economist Thomas Piketty has used the steady state capital-to-income ratio to track the aggregate wealth to income ratio over the past three centuries and to make predictions about this ratio into the future. Over the last thirty years this ratio has increased to the high levels observed in Europe during the 1700-1900 period. Projections to the end of this century predict that the capital-income ratio will continue to increase due to declining growth rates for productivity and population. A higher capital-to-income ratio indicates increased wealth inequality since the ownership of capital is highly concentrated. In this note a simple integrated assessment model is used to examine the potential impacts of climate change on the capital-to-income ratio over the next two and a half centuries. Damages arising from climate change can affect the capital-to-income ratio and hence wealth inequality over the next two centuries in a more dramatic manner than the impact of financial deregulation has done in the past. Specifically, the capital-to-income ratio will fall if damage from climate change increases the depreciation rate of capital. However, this decline in the capital-to-income ratio is somewhat mitigated if climate change acts to slow labor-augmenting technical progress.

This paper aims to investigate whether financial integration has taken place in the EU banking markets after stages of financial deregulation and transition period. We first measure bank cost and profit efficiencies using the stochastic frontier approach (SFA) for commercial banks operating in the 27 EU countries, and then we investigate the integration of EU banking efficiency over the period 2004-2010. By employing β- convergence and σ- convergence we assess the speed at which banking markets are integrated with regard to banking cost and profit efficiencies. The results seem to provide a solid evidence of convergence of cost and profit efficiency levels towards the averages in the entire EU, the old EU countries and the new EU countries groups. Nonetheless, the results also show that banks within the old EU countries are more integrated over the study period than their counterparts in the new EU countries particularly in the case of cost efficiency.

The three countries took different stances in regards to economic policy; the Czech Republic pursued a shock therapy regime which aimed to stabilise the economy, Hungary’s policy was more relaxed whilst Poland had an aggressive reform programme. Regarding monetary policy the Czech Republic used the discount rate as a tool for monetary policy, Hungary used indirect monetary policy and Poland had strict monetary policies which raised interest rates and devalued the zloty. After financial deregulation the impact of economic and monetary policy led to positive economic growth in the Czech Republic year on year. Hungary had a similar experience whilst Poland had an initial high increase in economic growth. This reduced over time but they still recorded positive economic growth over the period studied.

The financial liberalization in the four Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) that took place mostly in the 1980s led to a major financial crisis in three of those countries. The crises in Finland, Norway, and Sweden are among the deepest financial crises in advanced market economies since World War II. Denmark experienced some banking problems but managed to avoid a systemic crisis. This paper reviews the process of liberalization and discusses the reasons why Finland, Norway, and Sweden drifted into financial and economic crises.

This paper examines the effects of the bank merger deregulation passed by U.S. Congress in 1994 on the board composition of banks which, in turn, can be used to implicate bank governance. This banking legislation permits banks to merge across states and also motivates states to relax other banking restrictions. Using the panel data of about 1,900 banks in 14 states for 3 years, I found that banks in states with intrastate branching deregulation had a lower proportion of outside board directors (OBDs) and banks in states with interstate banking and the bank holding company deregulation had a higher percentage of OBDs. De novo entry deregulation also led to a higher percentage of OBDs, although the effect was not so significant. Moreover, using two-stage regressions, I was able to show that interstate deregulation, notably interstate banking and de novo entry, influenced the board composition through takeover possibilities. Therefore, the substitute hypothesis, stating that a takeover threat and OBD monitoring are substitutes in controlling managers, does not seem to hold for the banking industry. Finally, the board composition change in states with intrastate branching deregulation arose from bank branching behavior while the bank size deregulation meant banks became larger and consequently had more OBDs on the board.

This paper provides evidence on the links between financial deregulation and economic performance in a European context. Specifically, we study the relaxation of bank branching restrictions in Spain which triggered off a remarkable inter-regional expansion of savings banks which was coincidental with an unprecedented period of sustained growth. Although related questions have been largely investigated for the US, the European experiences remain largely unexplored. An additional contribution is the use of quantile regression techniques which, unlike traditional OLS regression analysis, do not focus on the “average effect for the average province”. This change of focus helps to overcome the difficulties found by previous studies in identifying any strong link between financial deregulation and growth. We also extend the analysis to other measures of economic activity, not only per capita income but also labor productivity and capital intensity. Our main findings indicate that, should bank inter-regional branch deregulation have any positive effect, the most benefited provinces would be the least developed ones.

The financial crisis that struck the global economy in late 2008 had its origins in excesses in the US housing market. Its reverberations, however, were felt around the world and nowhere more keenly than in Western Europe. While North Atlantic trade links were in relative stasis, the North Atlantic furnished a uniquely close relationship across financial institutions, as a combination of dominant US financial markets, European competition policy, and differences in financial regulation made the European banking system heavily dependent on dollar wholesale funding. Empirical estimates and macroeconomic model simulations indicate that growth spillovers predominantly flow westwards across the North Atlantic. The bellwether nature of US financial markets creates uniquely large spillovers to the rest of the world even in normal times, and these spillovers are only enhanced if disruptions to bank wholesale funding markets are added -- as occurred during the recent global crisis.

The financial labor supply accelerator links hours worked to minimum down payments for durable good purchases. When these constrain a household's debt, a persistent wage increase generates a liquidity shortage. This limits the income effect, so hours worked grow. The mechanism generates a positive comovement of labor supply and household debt, the strength of which depends positively on the minimum downpayment rate. Its potential macroeconomic importance comes from these labor supply fluctuations' procyclicality. This paper examines the comovement of hours worked and debt at the household level with PSID data - before and after the financial deregulation of the early 1980s which reduced effective down payments - and compares the evidence with results from model-generated data. The household-level data displays positive comovement between hours worked and debt, which weakens after the financial reforms. An empirically realistic reduction of the model's required down payments generates a quantitatively similar weakening.

The current financial crisis, which has lasted almost one and a half years, is the 19th such crisis in the post-war period in advanced economies. Recent literature classifies the Nordic crises in Norway, Sweden and Finland in late 1980's and early 1990’s among the Big Five crises that have happened before the current crisis, which is now of a global nature. This paper outlines the developments of the Nordic crises, reasons behind them and crisis management by the authorities. Relatively more emphasis is placed on the Finnish crisis, as it was the deepest one. The paper concludes by considering the lessons that can be drawn from the Nordic crises.

This paper argues that the sustained decline in the volatilities of real variables over the past two decades in the United States can be partially attributed to financial innovations in the late-1970s. Prior to these changes, households faced significant transaction costs, which deterred them from fully adjusting their portfolios every period. However, advances in information technology and financial deregulation decreased transaction costs, facilitating portfolio re-balancing and increasing household participation. Higher household participation decreases the volatility of asset prices, which in turn contributes to smoothing investment and consumption. Changing from a portfolio sluggishness of four quarters to complete flexibility can account for almost 25 percent of the decline in the volatilities of output, consumption, and investment.

The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland all experienced an initial reduction in the number of industries and an increase in unemployment, once they moved to a market driven economy. Over time the unemployment problem reduced in significance though Poland still experiences high levels to date. Industries sprung up in the private sector in all three countries which counterbalanced the drop in state enterprises. Private sector industries all reported easy access to credit once the business set up while firms with head offices overseas tended to use the home country for borrowing purposes. For these companies, the most significant feature of financial deregulation in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland was that of freedom of capital movement, which increased both the level of business and investment opportunities. Results show that financial deregulation led to industrial development in all three countries. Tests to indicate the impact of industrial production on economic growth, show that for the three countries industrial production caused economic growth. This was a uni-directional causality.

We estimate the effects of deregulation of U.S. banking restrictions on the amount of interstate personal income insurance during the period 1970-2001. Interstate income insurance occurs when personal income reacts less than one-to-one to state-specific shocks to output. We find that income insurance improved after banking deregulation, and that this effect is larger in states where small businesses are more important. We further show that the impact of deregulation is stronger for proprietors' income than other components of personal income. Our explanation of this result enters on the role of banks as a prime source of small business finance and on the close intertwining of the personal and business finances of small business owners. Our analysis casts light on the real effects of bank deregulation, on the risk sharing function of banks, and on the integration of bank markets.

The paper presents an overview of several studies about the credibility of the European Monetary System (EMS). These studies compare different credibility indicators in terms of their ability to detect exchange rate crises in a target zone. Marginal credibility seems to be the best measure for capturing the main events. The credibility indices are also applied to the first years of the current ERM-II. The history of the EMS suggests that, in an environment of financial deregulation and high capital flows, such an exchange rate system can only operate as a temporary regime that is moving towards a full monetary union, since it may be too fragile as a permanent monetary regime

The UK experienced a major residential real estate boom-bust cycle from the mid-Eighties to the mid-Nineties, accompanied by unprecedented shifts in the owner occupancy rate of young households. Previous empirical analyses have pointed toward income changes and financial deregulation as the likely causes of this episode, with little to say about the differential effects on various age groups. We show that, in a life-cycle model with income heterogeneity and credit constraints, the observed co-movements of housing prices and owner occupancy rates can be explained as an equilibrium response to income and credit market shocks. Our findings suggest that the financial liberalisation of the early Eighties was crucial for the unparalleled increase in the owner occupancy rate of young households during the boom.