An illuminating perspective on the polarizing effects of campaign finance reform

Modern political culture features a deep-seated faith in the power of numbers. But quantitative evidence has not always been revered, as William Deringer shows. After the 1688 Revolution, as Britons learned to fight by the numbers, their enthusiasm for figures arose not from efforts to find objective truths but from the turmoil of politics itself.

Since 2008, the financial sector has been the subject of extensive criticism. Much of this criticism has focused on the morality of the actors involved in the crisis and its extended aftermath. This book analyses the key moral and political philosophical issues of the crisis and relates them to the political economy of finance. It also examines to what extent the financial sector can or should be reformed. This book is unified by the view that the financial sector had been a self-serving and self-regulating elite consumed by greed, speculation and even lawlessness, with little sense of responsibility to the wider society or common good. In light of critical analysis by authors from a variety of backgrounds and persuasions, suggestions for reform and improvement are proposed, in some cases radical reform. By placing the world of finance under a microscope, this book analyses the assumptions that have led from hubris to disgrace as it provides suggestions for an improved society. Rooted in philosophical reflection, this book invites a critical reassessment of finance and its societal role in the 21st century. This book will be of interest to academics, politicians, central bankers and financial regulators who wish to improve the morality of finance.

Ten original essays examine the political and institutional factors that influence the initiation and efficiency of preferential credit policies in Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile, Mexico, and Brazil.

Government bailouts; negative interest rates and markets that do not behave as economic models tell us they should; new populist and nationalist movements that target central banks and central bankers as a source of popular malaise; new regional organizations and geopolitical alignments laying claim to authority over the global economy; households, consumers, and workers facing increasingly intolerable levels of inequality: These dramatic conditions seem to cry out for new ways of understanding the purposes, roles, and challenges of central banks and financial governance more generally. Financial Citizenship reveals that the conflicts about who gets to decide how central banks do all these things, and about whether central banks are acting in everyone’s interest when they do them, are in large part the product of a culture clash between experts and the various global publics that have a stake in what central banks do. Experts—central bankers, regulators, market insiders, and their academic supporters—are a special community, a cultural group apart from many of the communities that make up the public at large. When the gulf between the culture of those who govern and the cultures of the governed becomes unmanageable, the result is a legitimacy crisis. This book is a call to action for all of us—experts and publics alike—to address this legitimacy crisis head on, for our economies and our democracies.

This book analyzes the political economy of higher education finance across a range of OECD countries, exploring why some students pay extortionate tuition fees whilst for others their education is free. What are the redistributional consequences of these different tuition-subsidy systems? Analysing the variety of existing systems, Garritzmann shows that across the advanced democracies “Four Worlds of Student Finance” exist. Historically, however, all countries’ higher education systems looked very much alike in the 1940s. The book develops a theoretical model, the Time-Sensitive Partisan Theory, to explain why countries have evolved from a similar historical starting point to today’s very distinct Four Worlds. The empirical analyses combine a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative evidence, studying higher education policies in all advanced democracies from 1945-2015.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the relationship between financial and real sector development. The different chapters, written by leading contributors in the field, survey research on the importance of financial development for economic growth, the causes and consequences of financial fragility, the historic development of financial systems in several major economies and regions of the world, and the regulatory and supervisory underpinnings of financial sector development.