International financial centres used to be stable economic clusters held together by the centripetal forces emanating from physical exchanges. However, given near complete ‘virtualisation’, these ‘anchors’ have gradually disappeared. As this article demonstrates, this has had telling consequences for second-tier financial centres like Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Empirically, the article adds cases of financial centre decline to the existing collection of case descriptions. Theoretically, the article assesses the explanatory capacity of the combination of two complementary theoretical perspectives, New Economic Geography and Comparative Political Economy, by determining to what extent they fit the two case studies.
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Engelen et al. (2009) studied this question.