Before the crisis of 1997-98, the East Asian economies except for Japan but including China pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar. To avoid further turmoil, the IMF now argues that these currencies should float more freely. However, our econometric estimations show that the dollar's...

Since the end of the Great Recession, growth in health care spending has declined to historically low levels. There is disagreement over whether this decline was caused by falling incomes during the Great Recession (and therefore is likely to reverse once the recovery is complete) or whether the...

We estimate a workhorse dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with an occasionally binding borrowing constraint. First, we propose a new specification of the occasionally binding constraint, where the transition between the unconstrained and constrained states is a stochastic...

We leverage spatial variation in the severity of the Great Recession across the United States to examine its impact on mortality and to explore implications for the welfare consequences of recessions. We estimate that an increase in the unemployment rate of the magnitude of the Great Recession...

This paper studies whether the volume and composition of capital flows affect the degree of credit crunch during the 2007-2009 crisis. Using data on 3823 firms in 24 emerging countries, we find that, on average, the decline in stock prices was more severe for firms that are intrinsically more...

In this paper we explore the ‘Mrs. Machlup's Wardrobe' hypothesis to understand the growing trend of Latin American economies amassing large stocks of international reserves. Using annual data from 1980 to 2007, we examine the relevance of the argument that economies continue to add to their...

Recent macroeconomic experience has drawn attention to the importance of interdependence among countries through financial markets and institutions, independently of traditional trade linkages. This paper develops a model of the international transmission of shocks due to interdependent...

In this paper, we show that cross-border portfolio flows around the peak of the European Crisis induced households to rebalance their portfolios toward housing. Estimating difference-in-differences regressions around Draghi's "Whatever It Take" speech in July 2012 with household data from the...

We show that multinational firms transmit shocks across countries through their internal capital markets. We study a credit supply shock to parent firms in Germany. International affiliates outside Germany supported their parents through internal lending, became financially constrained...

China's remarkable run of persistently high growth in recent decades is all the more stunning in light of the country's low levels of financial and institutional development, state-dominated economy, and nondemocratic government. Notwithstanding the inefficient and risky growth model, the...