We examine the role of substitution from traditional to modern energy carriers and of differential rates of innovation in the use of each of these in Sweden from 1850 to 1950. We use a simple growth model with a nested CES production function and exogenous factor augmenting technological change...

Theory, historiography and empirical evidence suggest that agriculture is the key to economic development. This paper examines the extent to which productivity advances in British agriculture in the period 1620-1850 were driven by technological progress. Measuring technology by patents and new...

We propose a simple network–based methodology for ranking systemically important financial institutions. We view the risks of firms –including both the financial sector and the real economy– as a network with nodes representing the volatility shocks. The metric for the connections of the...

The global financial crisis of 2007-09 has led to an intensive research program analyzing a wide range of issues related to financial crises. This paper presents a summary of a forthcoming book, Financial Crises: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses, that includes 19 contributions...

This paper reviews the literature on financial crises focusing on three specific aspects. First, what are the main factors explaining financial crises? Since many theories on the sources of financial crises highlight the importance of sharp fluctuations in asset and credit markets, the paper...

The misevaluation of risk in securitized financial products is central to understand- ing the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. This paper characterizes the evolution of factors affecting collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) based on subprime mortgages. A key feature of subprime-mortgage backed...

Regional differences in banking integration determined how Japan's Great Recession after 1990 spread across the country. We explain these differences with the emergence of silk reeling as the main export industry after Japan's opening to trade in the 19th century. The silk-exporting prefectures...

The global financial crisis of 2008 was a crisis affecting both the financial sector and the “real economy”. This paper analyzes the transmission of unexpected shocks from the financial sector in the US to other countries and sectors. We test the hypothesis that the financial crisis spread...

A fast growing literature on small open economy models with pecuniary externalities has provided the theoretical grounds for the policy analysis of macro prudential regulations. Using the framework of Jeanne and Korinek (2010), we investigate whether a subsidy on debt during crises as a form of...

We examine the role of bank leverage to explain why the 2007-08 financial crisis unfolded at a time when the economy appears to be less fragile to crisis risks. To this end, we extend the model introduced by Diamond and Rajan (2012) to a variant where the probability of financial crises varies...