In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the issue of how best to identify speculative asset bubbles (in real-time) remains in flux. This owes to the difficulty of disentangling irrational investor exuberance from the rational response to lower risk based on price behavior alone. In...

This paper presents a new version of MAPMOD (Mark II) to study the effectiveness of macroprudential regulations. We extend the original model by explicitly modeling the housing market. We show how household demand for housing, house prices, and bank mortgages are intertwined in what we call a...

Policymakers often express concern that herding by financial market participants destabilizes markets and increases the fragility of the financial system. This paper provides an overview of the recent theoretical and empirical research on herd behavior in financial markets. It addresses the...

This paper (i) provides evidence on the procyclical investment behavior of major institutional investors during the global financial crisis; (ii) identifies the main factors that could account for such behavior; (iii) discusses the implications of procyclical behavior; and (iv) proposes a...

Classic models of fire-sales that emphasize liquidity-constrained natural buyers can-notfully account for the asset fire-sales during the Financial Crisis of 2008. I present a modelto demonstrate that fire-sales may happen even when there is a sizable pool of naturalbuyers and in the absence of...

This relatively simple model attempts to capture and integrate four widely held views about financial crises. [1] Interconnectedness among financial institutions (banks) can play a major role in precipitating systemic financial crises. [2] Lack of information about the quality of bank portfolios...

We explore empirically how the time-varying allocation of credit across firms with heterogeneous credit quality matters for financial stability outcomes. Using firm-level data for 55 countries over 1991-2016, we show that the riskiness of credit allocation, captured by Greenwood and Hanson...

We analyze how bank profitability impacts financial stability from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We first develop a theoretical model of the relationship between bank profitability and financial stability by exploring the role of non-interest income and retail-oriented business...

In distilling a vast literature spanning the rational — irrational divide, this paper offers reflections on why asset bubbles continue to threaten economic stability despite financial markets becoming more informationally-efficient, more complete, and more heavily influenced by sophisticated...