This paper assesses the role of the political environment in the timing of financial crises over a sample of 85 countries during the period 1975-2017. We consider systemic banking, currency and sovereign debt crises in addition to twin and triple crises. Using a fixed-effects logit model, this study shows that banking and currency crises are more likely to occur within 1 year after elections. There is also evidence that the probability of currency crises increases when right-wing parties are in office.Moreover, time in office of incumbent chief executives reduces the likelihood of any type of financial crises. The incidence of twin and triple crises is lower when majority governments are in office. This study contributes to the literature by calling attention to the importance of some political factors for different types of financial crises.

No abstract

No abstract

Urban commercial banks are regional banks which have gained tremendous importance in the last two decades in China. There is, however, a lack of research on regional banking, especially on the Chinese regional banking industry. Therefore, using an innovative spatial approach, this paper investigates the efficiency of 65 Chinese urban commercial banks across 26 regions during 2013-2017. A key finding for our sample is the significant spatial dependence of loans of Chinese urban commercial banks with their neighbouring regions' banks. Shortrun efficiency is increasing during the research period. For regions with less than three urban commercial banks, the average efficiencies are stable and relatively high. However, regions with more banks have both the highest and lowest efficient banks at the same time. These interesting results fit with the development process of Chinese urban commercial banking, in which the market restructuring has contributed to banks' efficiency.

This paper reconsiders the contribution of Henry Ludwell Moore to dynamic economics through the use of harmonic analysis. We show that Moore’s analysis is innovative in its use of the Fourier transformation for the identification of cycles with different periodicities. This enables Moore to identify cycles of longer length with more precision than would be the case for the standard methodology. We are able to replicate the main features of his results and confirm the existence of a rainfall cycle with a periodicity similar to that of the business cycle (eight years). However, we find that the evidence for a longer (thirty-three-year) rainfall cycle is weaker than Moore indicates. We also argue that a central theme of Moore’s analysis—the relationship among rainfall, agricultural productivity, and the business cycle—marks an early precursor of the “real business cycle” approach. George Stigler’s (1962) dismissal of Moore’s work on cycles as “a complete failure” is therefore, in our opinion, unfair. Instead, we argue that, although his work is certainly flawed, it nevertheless deserves a place in both the history of business cycle theory and empirical economics.