The global financial crisis that emerged in mid-2007 has caused considerable economic disruptions in the United States and elsewhere, and exposed major flaws in the global financial system. After examining the origins of the crisis, this paper recommends specific policy responses to resolve the...

Using individual-level data on homeowner debt and defaults from 1997 to 2008, we show that borrowing against the increase in home equity by existing homeowners is responsible for a significant fraction of both the rise in U.S. household leverage from 2002 to 2006 and the increase in defaults...

The global financial crisis that emerged in mid 2007 has caused considerable economic disruptions in the United States and elsewhere, and exposed major flaws in the global financial system. After examining the origins of the crisis, this paper recommends specific policy responses to resolve the...

The global financial and economic crisis has struck Iceland with extreme force. Iceland’s three main banks, accounting for almost all of the banking system, failed in October 2008. They were unable to resist the deterioration in global financial markets following the failure of Lehman...

The notable increase in international reserve holdings over the past decade and their use during the global financial crisis of 2008/2009 has sparked renewed interest in the analysis of the optimal level of reserve holdings, in particular in countries which are subject to sudden stops. Less...

We study how and to what extent private households are affected by the recent financial crisis and how their financial decisions are inuenced by this shock. Our analysis reveals that individuals with low levels of financial literacy are less likely to have invested in the stock market and thus...

The causes of the 2008 collapse and subsequent surge in global capital flows remain an open and highly controversial issue. Employing a factor model coupled with a dataset of high-frequency portfolio capital flows to 50 economies, the paper finds that common shocks - key crisis events as well as...

We explore what private market data can tell us about the appropriate discount rates for valuing investments in climate change abatement. We estimate the term structure of discount rates for real estate up to the very long horizons relevant for investments in climate change abatement. The...

We investigate asset returns around banking crises in 44 advanced and emerging economies from 1960 to 2018. In contrast to the view that buying assets during banking crises is a profitable long-run strategy, we find returns of equity and other asset classes generally underperform after banking...

Variables with strong marginal explanatory power in cross-section asset pricing regressions typically show less power to produce increments to average portfolio returns, for two reasons. (i) Adding an explanatory variable can attenuate the slopes in a regression. (ii) Adding a variable with...