The great moderation lulled macroeconomists and policymakers alike in the belief that we knew how to conduct macroeconomic policy. The crisis clearly forces us to question that assessment. In this paper, we review the main elements of the precrisis consensus, identify where we were wrong and...

We analyze the effects of bailout expectations on sovereign bond spreads in emerging markets. The non-bailout of Russia in August 1998 is interpreted as an event that decreased the perceived probability of future crisis lending to emerging markets. If official rescues are expected to mitigate...

We investigate the effects of competition in the financial sector on the creation of firms in the nonfinancial sector, explicitly allowing for heterogeneous effects across borrowers characterized by different degrees of asymmetric information. We find evidence of a bell-shaped relationship...