A financial crisis is an event of sudden information acquisition about the collateral backing short-term debt in credit markets. When investors see a financial crisis coming, however, they react by more intensively acquiring information about firms in stock markets, revealing those that are...

There is a demand for safe assets, either government bonds or private substitutes, for use as collateral. Government bonds are safe assets, given the government's power to tax, but their supply is driven by fiscal considerations, and does not necessarily meet the private demand for safe assets....

The amount of information produced about firms' productivities and about the quality of collateral backing their loans varies over time. These information dynamics determine the evolution of credit, output and productivity, which feeds back into incentives to produce information. We characterize...

Economic variables are known to move asymmetrically over the business cycle: quickly and sharply during crises, but slowly and gradually during recoveries. Not known is the fact that this asymmetry is stronger in countries with less-developed financial systems. This new fact is documented using...

I test the Dang, Gorton, and Holmström (2018) (DGH) theory that the optimal design of private money is debt backed by debt. I do this in the context of English inland bills of exchange (where all parties to the bill were in England), which were used as a medium of exchange during the Industrial...

Financial crises are bank runs. At root the problem is short-term debt (private money), which while an essential feature of market economies, is inherently vulnerable to runs in all its forms (not just demand deposits). Bank regulation aims at preventing bank runs. History shows two approaches...

All bond prices plummeted (spreads rose) during the financial crisis, not just the prices of subprime- related bonds. These price declines were due to a banking panic in which institutional investors and firms refused to renew sale and repurchase agreements (repo) - short-term, collateralized,...

The credit crisis was sparked by a shock to fundamentals, housing prices failed to rise, which led to a collapse of trust in credit markets. In particular, the repurchase agreement market in the U.S., estimated to be about $12 trillion, larger than the total assets in the U.S. banking system...

Understanding the ongoing credit crisis or panic requires understanding the designs of a number of interlinked securities, special purpose vehicles, and derivatives, all related to subprime mortgages. I describe the relevant securities, derivatives, and vehicles to show: (1) how the chain of...

How did problems with subprime mortgages result in a systemic crisis, a panic? The ongoing Panic of 2007 is due to a loss of information about the location and size of risks of loss due to default on a number of interlinked securities, special purpose vehicles, and derivatives, all related to...