This paper provides a brief analysis of three major questions raised in the context of the recent global financial crisis. First, how similar is the crisis to previous episodes? We argue that the crisis featured some close similarities to earlier ones, including the presence of credit and asset...

Using a generalized vector autoregressive framework in which forecast-error variance decompositions are invariant to variable ordering, we propose measures of both total and directional volatility spillovers. We use our methods to characterize daily volatility spillovers across U.S. stock, bond,...

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly is one of the best, if not the best, books ever written on the history of financial crises. It presents a comprehensive survey of financial crises utilizing an extraordinary database of macroeconomic and financial series. The massive...