"In the words of Milton, I would say that regulation should be designed to enable financial institutions to be 'sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.'" ; Remarks before the Cato Institute's 27th Annual Monetary Conference, Washington, D.C., November 19, 2009

Attempts by governments to stop bubbles by issuing warnings seem unsuccessful. This paper examines the effects of public warnings using a simple model of riding bubbles. We show that public warnings against a bubble can stop it if investors believe that a warning is issued in a definite range of...

Shocks emanating from and propagating through the banking system have recently gained interest in the macroeconomics literature, yet they are not a feature unique to the 2008/09 financial crisis. Banking disintermediation shocks occured frequently during the Great Inflation era due to fixed...

What is the marginal effect of an increase in the private sector debt-to-GDP ratio on the probability of a banking crisis? This paper shows that the marginal effect of rising debt levels depends on an economy's external position. When the current account is in surplus or in balance, the marginal...

This paper provides a set of stylized facts on the mechanisms through which banking and sovereign distress feed into each other, using a large sample of emerging economies over three decades. We first define “twin crises” as events where banking crises and sovereign defaults combine, and...

Interventions by the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis of 2007-2009 were generally viewed as unprecedented and in violation of the rules---notably Bagehot’s rule---that a central bank should follow to avoid the time-inconsistency problem and moral hazard. Reviewing the evidence for...

I document a strong negative correlation, both across and within countries, between housing and current account dynamics. I use two methodologies to analyze three potential drivers of housing markets. First, in a quantitative two-country model, I input the dynamics of population, loan-to-value...

Texas is the only US state that limits home equity borrowing to 80 percent of home value. This paper exploits this policy discontinuity around the Texas’ interstate borders and uses a multidimensional regression discontinuity design framework to find that limits on home equity borrowing in...

This paper re-examines Japan's experience of the quantitative easing policy in light of the policy responses against the current financial and economic crisis. Central banks use various unconventional measures in the range of financial assets being purchased and in the scale of such purchases....

In the literature on systemic banking crises, two common themes are: (1) lack of market discipline encourages risky lending and (2) financial liberalization or privatization lead to risky lending. However, there is evidence to suggest that neither financial liberalization nor weak market...