We present a new empirical decomposition of the effects of financial liberalization on economic growth and on the incidence of crises. Our empirical estimates show that the direct effect of financial liberalization on growth by far outweighs the indirect effect via a higher propensity to crisis....

Intro -- Contents -- EXECUTIVE SUMMARY -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THEORY -- III. MEASURING FINANCIAL OPENNESS -- IV. PATTERNS OF FINANCIAL GLOBALIZATION -- V. MACROECONOMIC EVIDENCE ON EFFECTS OF FINANCIAL GLOBALIZATION -- VI. HOW DOES THE COMPOSITION OF CAPITAL FLOWS MATTER?...

In our book, Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis, and Growth, we traced out the evolution of the international monetary system using the framework of the “international monetary trilemma”: countries can enjoy at most two from the set {exchange-rate stability, open capital markets,...

This paper offers a quot;panoramicquot; analysis of the history of financial crises dating from England's fourteenth-century default to the current United States sub-prime financial crisis. Our study is based on a new dataset that spans all regions. It incorporates a number of important credit...

A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century's first global...

Considerable debate rages about whether Federal Reserve policy was too lax in the early part of the 2000s, thereby fueling the home-price bubble that was the proximate cause of the global financial crisis. We present evidence that the view that modest alterations to monetary policy have vast...

We document that the global scope and depth of the crisis the began with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the summer of 2007 is unprecedented in the post World War II era and, as such, the most relevant comparison benchmark is the Great Depression (or the Great Contraction, as...

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...