The History of Mexico: From Pre-Conquest to Present traces the last 500 years of Mexican
history, from the indigenous empires that were devastated by the Spanish conquest through …

This essay examines three recent historical approaches to the political economy of Latin
America's relative economic backwardness. All three locate the origins of contemporary …

How did modern and centralized fiscal institutions emerge? We develop a model that
explains (i) why pre-industrial states relied on private individuals to collect taxes;(ii) why after …

Related lending, a widespread practice in LDCs, is widely held to encourage bankers to loot
their banks at the expense of minority shareholders and depositors. We argue that neither …

Nineteenth-century Brazil's constitutional monarchy credibly committed to repay sovereign
debt, borrowing repeatedly in international and domestic capital markets without default. Yet …

Offshore financial centers such as Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands or the City of London
provide non-residents with a legal framework that is strong on property rights and soft on …

New data are presented for a large number of countries on how frequently former high-
ranking politicians become bank directors. Politician-banker connections at this level are …

El presente libro propone una visión global del desempeño del Erario de Nueva España en
el periodo 1808-1821, a partir de sus principales variables (ingreso, egreso, déficit y deuda …

Peru's experience with sovereign debt during the guano boom is one of the most remarkable
in the nineteenth century. Despite the country's ongoing political instability and poor capital …

This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly
defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution …