State and Financial Systems in Europe and the USA

Farnham. 2010

Editors

Stefano Battilossi

Jaime Reis

During the twentieth century the financial sector became possibly the most regulated area of the economy in many advanced and developing countries. The interwar years represented the defining moment for the escalation of governments’ intervention, turning the State into the core of financial systems in its capacity of regulator, supervisor or owner. The essays in this collection shed light on different aspects of the experience of financial regulation, ownership and deregulation in Europe and the USA from a secular historical perspective. The volume’s chapters explore how the political economy of finance changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how such changes were related to shifting attitudes towards globalization. They also investigate how regulation responded to governance problems of financial intermediaries and markets, and how different legal frameworks and institutional architectures influenced such response.

Table of contents

• The making of Financial Regulation and Deregulation: A long View (Stefano Battilossi and Jaime Reis)
• ‘Conservative abroad, liberal at home’; British Banking Regulation during the Nineteenth Century (Philip L. Cottrell)
• Lobbying, Institutional inertia, and the efficiency Issue in State Regulation: Evidence from the Evolution of Bankruptcy laws and Procedures in Italy, England and the US (c. 1870-1939) (Paolo di Martino)
• Regulation and Governance: A Secular Perspective on the Development of the American Financial System (Eugene N. White)
• The London Stock Exchange and the British Government in the Twentieth Century (Ranald C. Michie)
• The State in the French Financial System during the Twentieth Century: A Specific Case? (Laure Quennouëlle-Corre and André Straus)
• The Emergence of Central Banks and Banking Supervision in Comparative Perspective (Richard S. Grossman)
• Regulation and Supervision in Comparative: The Rise of Central Banks Research Departments (Pablo Martín-Aceña and Teresa Tortella)
• The Regulation of International Financial Markets from the 1950sto the 1990s (Catherine R. Schenk)
• The Missing Link: International Banking Supervision in the Archives of the BIS (Piet Clement)
• Banking Crises in the North: A Comparative (Peter Englund and Vesa Vihriälä)