Publications
The UPIER Working Papers
The UPIER Working Papers series reflects the work in progress of the researchers associated with the HERA-funded project Uses of the Past in International Economic Relations and of others whose papers directly address UPIER research themes. The papers are peer reviewed by UPIER and associated researchers and seek to advance our understanding of how the past has been constructed and used in international economic relations over the past 200 years.
International Money Markets, Liquidity Risk And Financial Cooperation In The Wake Of The Latin American Debt Crisis Of 1982
By Sebastian Alvarez
Failures in the international money markets and their systemic implications have attracted a great deal of attention in the wake of the recent global financial crisis. Liquidity problems in the interbank funding markets are not a new phenomenon...
Regulatory Competition and Complementarity in an Offshore Financial Centre: The Asia Dollar Market in Singapore and Hong Kong 1968-86
By Catherine Schenk
Offshore financial centres have attracted considerable critical attention over the past few decades as havens for lightly taxed funds that circulate outside the regulatory oversight of major financial centres. This paper addresses the emergence of an offshore market in US dollars in Singapore from the late 1960s...
A Fatal Flaw: Domestic Banks and Mexico's International Negotiating Position in the 1982 Debt Crisis
By Sebastian Alvarez
The recent European debt crises has renewed interest as to why debtor countries honor their foreign debts and subscribe to respectively burdensome rescheduling conditions. While the cost of defaulting...
Applying Lessons from the Past? Exploring ECB Speeches During the Great Recession
By Anselm Kuesters
During the Great Recession speechmakers from the ECB executive board drew lessons from the interwar years to inform their policy. Here, Text Mining methods and structural model analysis are used to examine 1009 speeches given between 2007 and 2015.
The Balance of Imbalance: Between Deposits and Lending In Swedish Commercial Banking, 1870 - 1994
By Mats Larsson & Henric Häggqvist
Whether or not Swedish commercial banks take undue risks in their intermediation of credit is an ongoing topic of discussion. Here, the authors study the deposit and lending ratio of Swedish banks in the past in order to reveal how different banks make assessments of risk and develop their lending policies over time.
Past Meets Present: The Federal Reserve and the US Money Market, 1913-1929
By Mary O'Sullivan
The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was supposed to transform the money market and its relationship to the banking system in the United States. This paper explores the historical narratives which reformers used to frame and implement these major policy reforms.
The City and Financial Services After Brexit: Historical Perspectives
By Catherine R. Schenk
Among the many uncertainties about the nature of the UK’s international economic relations after Brexit, the role of the City of London as a financial centre is one of the most difficult to predict. This paper examines the City's history, and the evolution of London as an international financial centre, to appraise the City’s resilience and potential for innovation.
You Shall Know a Country by the Company it Keeps: Exploring Spain's Collocates in Die Zeit, 1946 - 2017
By Elisa Garrido Moreno
During the Eurozone and post-2008 crises the acronym PIGS served as a shorthand for designating European “problem” countries. Using collocation - or word pairing - analysis this paper investigates how this country grouping heuristic developed by looking at shifts in the words paired with “Spain” in Die Zeit between 1946 and 2017.
A Microanalysis of Trade Finance: German bank entry and coffee exports in Brazil, 1875 - 1913
by Wilfried Kisling
The trade-finance nexus has enjoyed increasing interest in recent economic studies, but empricial evidence is scarce and studies from a historical perspective seem missing. This study analyses the effect of German bank entry on Brazilian coffee exports between 1880 and 1913 using firm-level data.
Making Money Flow: Latin American banks and the onset of the Great Depression
By Adriana Calcagno and Juan Flores Zendejas
In Latin America most central banks were founded during the interwar period. This paper analyzes how these newly created institutions responded to the onset of the Great Depression.
Crisis resolution and the Asian Financial Crises--Uses of the Past in the Resolution of Financial Crises in Emerging Markets
By Åsa Malmström Rognes
This paper examines uses of the past in crisis resolution programmes in Asia in the 1990s finding that issues raised in Mexico in 1995 had yet to translate into policy and practice.
Financial crises — international dissemination and consequences in historical perspective.
Mats Larsson and Jan Ottosson (eds)
This paper is a documentation of a seminar on financial crises held at Uppsala, Sweden it provides a record of papers presented by Catherine Schenk, Youssef Cassis and Richard Roberts and the ensuing debate.
From Heath to Thatcher: The role of UK foreign policy in the development of the Eastern European Sovereign Debt Crisis, 1970-81.
By Catherine Lefèvre
This paper analyses the role of UK foreign policy in the development of the soverign debt crisis in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. It suggests that UK foreign policy helped to create the conditions that led to the development of this crisis.
The Evolution of Capital Adequacy Rules : the contrasting cases of Sweden and Britain.
By Åsa Malmström Rognes
In this paper the Swedish pro-active approach to banking regulation is contrasted with the approach adopted in Britain. It is suggested that their respective civil and common law traditions may explain their divergent approaches to defining and regulating capital adequacy.
The role of capital adequacy regulations in a period of crises – Swedish banking 1915-1935
by Mats Larsson
This paper analyses the introduction and use of capital adequacy requirements in Swedish commercial banking during the period 1915-1935. How were capital adequacy rules designed, and how did banks of different sizes react to their introduction? Were there any alterations to the capital adequacy requirements, and if so, how did the banks react to these?
Mining "Die Zeit": A Structural Topic Model Analysis of Spain's Image in the German Media 1946-2009
By Anselm Küsters and Elisa Garrido Moreno
The onset of the Eurozone crisis popularised the PIGS acronym. In order to investigate the historic formation of this country group heuristic we apply a Structural Topic Model (STM) to all 2,443 articles published in the German newspaper Die Zeit that mention Spain between 1946 and 2009.
Articles
Catherine R. Schenk (2017)
Negotiating Positive Non-interventionism: Regulating Hong Kong’s Finance Companies, 1976–1986
The China Quarterly, 1-23.
doi:10.1017/S0305741017000637
Since colonial times to the present day, Hong Kong’s position as a global financial centre is one of the enduring economic strengths of the territory. This success is often attributed to the distinctive role of the state, coined in the 1970s by the-then financial secretary, Sir Philip Haddon-Cave, as “positive non-interventionism.” The relationship between the market and the state...
Sebastian Alvarez (2017)
Venturing Abroad: The Internationalisation of Mexican Banks Prior to the 1982 Crisis
Published online by Cambridge University Press
This article explores the international expansion of Mexican banks and its implications for the domestic banking system during the decade leading up to the 1982 debt crisis. In contrast to the prevalent focus in the literature on profitability and performance, I examine the asset and liability structure of the banking sector and show that there were clear signs of deterioration in its financial condition well before the onset of the crisis...
Books
Mary A. O'Sullivan (2016)
Dividends of Development: Securities Markets in the History of U.S. Capitalism, 1866-1922
Oxford University Press
The unprecedented importance of finance in our societies, as well as its central role in provoking economic crises, has generated an enormous interest in understanding the historical origins and evolution of modern financial systems. Today the U.S. economy is seen as an archetype of a capitalist system in which securities markets play a central role. Moreover, these markets have had a high profile in some of the most dramatic moments in U.S. history, often in the context of crises.
Larsson, M., and Söderberg, G (2017)
Finance in the Welfare State: Banking Development and the Regulatory Principles in Sweden 1900-2015.
Palgrave
Larsson, M., Altamura, E., and Cassis, Y. (2016)
Commercial and Financial Services.
In: Cassis, Y., Colli, A., and Schröter, H. (eds.) The Performance of European Business in the Twentieth Century.
Oxford University Press, Oxford.
ISBN: 9780198749776
This chapter deals with the economic performance of the service and banking sectors in eight European countries during the 20th Century.
Larsson, M. (2016)
Banks, owners and the state. The long-term development and structure of Swedish commercial banks.
In: Lescure, M. (ed.) Immortal Banks. Strategies, Structures and Performance of major Banks. Droz: Geneva.
The chapter deals with the structural changes in Swedish banking since the late 19th Century. Special attention is given to the role of the state in the structural development of the banking system. The long-term survival and development of the Swedish banks Handelsbanken and SEB is also analyzed.
Battilossi, S. (2017)
Structural fiscal imbalances, financial repression and sovereign debt sustainability in Southern Europe, 1970s‒90s.
In: Buggeln M.et al (eds.) The Political Economy of Public Finance.
Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107140127