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...

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...

International business-cycle models assume that home and foreign goods are poor substitutes. International trade models assume they are close substitutes. This paper constructs a model where this discrepancy is due to frictions in distribution. Imports need to be combined with a local non-traded...

This paper analyzes the impact and effectiveness of conventional monetary policy during periods of low and high financial stress in the US economy. Using data from 1973Q1 to 2008Q4, the analysis is conducted by estimating a Threshold Vector Autoregression (TVAR) model to capture switching...

Standard macro models cannot explain why real exchange rates are volatile and disconnected from macro aggregates. Recent research argues that models with persistent growth rate shocks and recursive preferences can solve that puzzle. I show that this result is highly sensitive to the structure of...

In theory, valuation effects (changes in net external assets of a country arising from movements in exchange rates or asset returns) are an important channel of international risk sharing as they facilitate external adjustment. However, the effects can also be economically destabilizing in the...

The objective of our paper is to provide an empirical platform to the debate on the macroeconomic consequences of large currency appreciations. Observing the experiences of six major Asian economies (the ASEAN-5 (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Singapore) and Korea) during the...

We study how investor behaviour affects the transmission of ?financial crises. If investors exhibit decreasing relative risk aversion, then negative wealth shocks increase the risk premium required to hold risky assets. We integrate this into a second generation model of currency crises which...

The 1990s appreciation of the US$ has been blamed on the 'irrational exuberance' of investors in the US IT boom. A core of these investors appeared to believe that technology-related productivity growth (due, in part, to knowledge spill-over externalities) would raise the relative US rate of...