One key feature of the 2008-2009 crisis has been its international dimension, as most countries have experienced large synchronous contractions. The recent crisis has also been characterized by a sharp fall in employment but not in productivity. These two characterizing features of the recent...

Two observations suggest that financial globalization played an important role in the recent financial crisis. First, more than half of the rise in net borrowing of the U.S. nonfinancial sectors since the mid 1980s has been financed by foreign lending. Second, the collapse of the U.S. housing...

During the last three decades the stock of government debt has increased in most developed countries. During the same period international capital markets have been liberalized. In this paper we develop a two-country political economy model with incomplete markets and endogenous government...

The 2008-2009 US crisis is characterized by an unprecedented degree of international synchronization, as all other G7 countries experienced large contractions. The international synchronization of the recent crisis is not present in many of the previous US contractions. We study a two-country...