The sub-prime crisis began in mid-2007 as a bursting of the US housing market bubble and became a truly global meltdown in 2008. Renewed instability in financial markets precipitated awareness of how policy makers must react to systemic failures. This paper discusses the primary policy issues...

Empirically, a higher frequency of lightning strikes is associated with slower growth in labor productivity across the 48 contiguous U.S. states after 1990; before 1990, there is no correlation between growth and lightning. Other climate variables (e.g., temperature, rainfall, and tornadoes) do not...