Prof. Willett Edits Special Journal Issue on Data Sets Evaluating Financial Policies
Professor Thomas Willett is editing a two part special issue of the Journal of Financial Economic Policy on international comparisons of financial policies and their interactions. RDS professor Richard Burdekin and Manfred Keil are also contributors. The papers in the volume give students, faculty, and researchers in government and think tanks introductions to the many new data sets that recently have become available for use in quantitative studies of the effects of domestic and international financial policies. Many of the major econometric techniques used to study these effects are also surveyed.
These data sets give detailed measures of various types of financial policies and their institutional environments such as more detailed measures of financial liberalization and the quality of financial supervision and methods of estimating their influences on economic developments such as financial crises and aspects of international interdependence such as the recent debates about international contagion.
Besides summarizing the content of these data sets and indicating where they are available, their quality and that of the major approaches to quantitative estimation are critically evaluated and it is argued that the most appropriate data to use will often vary by the issue being studied. The importance of political economy factors in influencing these relationships is stressed.
While some advanced topics are covered, the major portion of these essays are designed to be useful for RDS students for term papers and senior theses.