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Queen's University Centre for Economic History  is hosting the EurHistock Conference this week. Some of the world's leading financial historians will be presenting papers which speak to current debates in financial economics. The conference programme is available here .

The Magna Carta ("The Great Charter") is a fascinating constitutional document. You can find out more about it at the British Library website . Many view the Magna Carta as the cornerstone of common law legal systems and modern political constitutions.  To celebrate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, the International Review of Law and Economics has published a special issue on the topic. This special issue attempts to answer the following questions: What did Magna Carta actually say? What economic problems was it solving? Is it a constitutional document or a myth? Why did it endure over eight centuries? What has been its influence? Is it relevant today?

It is a month since the UK's historic vote to exit the EU. The more that I reflect on Brexit, the more that I'm convinced that it is not one of the major economic headwinds facing the UK. There are at least five other major problems facing the UK economy which concern me - economic inequality, a dysfunctional financial system, declining labour productivity, a decline in growth-enhancing innovation, and China's ability to become a high-income economy. Brexit will impose an economic cost on the UK economy, but these five headwinds will ultimately determine the future of the UK economy. Indeed, several of these (particularly inequality) may even have contributed to the Brexit vote. Several of my colleagues at Queen's Management School have been doing some analysis of the result and vote. Alan Fernihough's piece can be found here ,  Chris Colvin's can be found here , and Sergey Popov's can be found here .

The latest review of my book Banking in Crisis has been published in Enterprise & Society . The review was written by Forrest Capie , an eminent economic historian based at Cass Business School and historian of the Bank of England (see his book here ). Capie writes the following: "John Turner has written a very good book. It is the product of some years of resarch. It is stimulating, thought provoking, and needs to be read by policy makers as well as bankers and historians".

I have been working with Qing Ye and Clive Walker on a paper which looks at the effect of the media on financial markets in nineteenth-century London. The main finding of our paper is that there is a media discount which appears after the emergence of arm's-length ownership and increased market participation. This suggests that diffuse ownership may be a prerequisite for the media effect. Our findings help explain why the media appears to have little effect on present-day developing country financial markets. The working paper is available at the QUCEH website.

Happy St Patrick's Day! Every year on St Patrick's Day, I re-read Patrick's autobiographical The Confession of St Patrick . An electronic version is available for free  here .

Sir John Vickers has published a VoxEU piece which is highly critical of the Bank of England's recent 'tame' proposals regarding the amount of capital banks should be required to hold. He argues persuasively that banks need to hold much more capital than suggested by the Bank. He is not alone. Stanford's Anat Admati has recently argued that capital regulation is deeply flawed in terms of its design and the limited amount of capital banks are required to post - click here .  In my book, Banking in Crisis , I make the argument that bankers need 'skin in the game' to make banking stable. How much skin should they have? Historically, bank shareholders stood to lose more than their investment in the bank due to extended shareholder liability regimes. In other words, they stood to lose much more than their skin in some cases! This, I argue, resulted in stable banks that acted conservatively, which in turn promoted banking stability.