This paper takes the view that a major contributing factor to the financial crisis of 2008 was a failure to correctly assess and price the risk of default. In order to analyse default risk in the macroeconomy, a simple general equilibrium model with banks and financial intermediation is...

Deteriorating public finances around the world raise doubts about countries’ abilities to bail out their largest banks. For an international sample of banks, this paper investigates the impact of government indebtedness and deficits on bank stock prices and CDS spreads. Overall, bank stock...

The recent crisis has led to a thriving academic and policy debate on the future regulation of financial institutions and markets. This paper argues that the objective of securing financial stability should be balanced with the goal of fostering financial deepening and efficiency, especially in...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, leading to deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

We provide an overview of the important events of the recent global financial crisis and their implications for exchange rates and market dynamics. Our goal is to catalogue all that was truly of major importance in this episode. We also construct a quantitative measure of crises that allows for...

We study the functioning and possible breakdown of the interbank market in the presence of counterparty risk. We allow banks to have private information about the risk of their assets. We show how banks' asset risk affects funding liquidity in the interbank market. Several interbank market...

With banking sectors worldwide still suffering from the effects of the financial crisis, public discussion of plans to place toxic assets in one or more bad banks has gained steam in recent weeks. The following paper presents a plan how governments can efficiently relieve ailing banks from toxic...

In the context of the global market for syndicated bank loans, we provide evidence that the collapse of international markets during financial crises can in part be explained by a flight home effect. We show that the home bias of lenders’ loan origination increases by approximately 20 percent...

How hospitable will the global environment be for economic growth in the developing world as we come out of the present financial crisis? The answer depends on how well we manage the following tension. On the one hand, global macro stability requires that we prevent external imbalances from...

This paper uses a model with a continuum of equilibrium unemployment rates to explore the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The existence of multiple steady states is explained by a model of costly search and recruiting that leads to a situation of bilateral monopoly. Using this framework, I...