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...

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes, researchers have been unable to directly assess these predictions because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. In...

Following four years of relative stability at around $105 per barrel, oil prices have declined sharply since June 2014. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the sources of the recent decline in prices, and examines its macroeconomic, financial and policy implications. The recent drop...

This paper studies how the sensitivity of consumption to income has changed over time as the degree of financial integration has risen. In standard theory, greater financial integration facilitates international borrowing and lending, helping to reduce the sensitivity of consumption growth to...