Using a semi-supervised topic model on 7,000,000 New York Times articles spanning 160 years, we test whether topics of media discourse predict future stock and bond market returns to test rational and behavioral hypotheses about market valuation of disaster risk. Focusing on media discourse...

This paper identifies how bank branching benefited local economies during the Great Depression. Using archival data and narrative evidence, I show how Bank of America's branch network in 1930s California created an internal capital market to diversify away local liquidity shortfalls, allowing it...

This paper assesses the current state of knowledge about crisis risk and its implications for risk management. Better data that became available since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has improved our understanding of crisis risk. These data have been used to show that some types of crises...

The heavy-tailed distribution of firm sizes first discovered by Zipf (1949) is one of the best established empirical facts in economics. We show that it has strong implications for asset pricing. Due to the concentration of the market portfolio when the distribution of the capitalization of...

The high social costs of financial crises imply that economists, policymakers, businesses, and households have a tremendous incentive to understand, and try to prevent them. And yet, so far we have failed to learn how to avoid them. In this article, we take a novel approach to studying financial...

We study the relationship between credit expansions, macroeconomic fluctuations, and financial crises using a novel database on the sectoral distribution of private credit for 117 countries since 1940. We document that, during credit booms, credit flows disproportionately to the non-tradable...

We study sovereign external debt crises over the past 200 years, with a focus on creditor losses, or "haircuts". Our sample covers 327 sovereign debt restructurings with external private creditors over 205 default spells since 1815. Creditor losses vary widely (from none to 100%), but the...

In line with Keynes' intuition, volatility in the stock market and in real economic activity are linked by expectations of long term profits. We show that analysts' optimism about the long term earnings growth of S&P 500 firms is associated with a near term boom in major US financial markets,...