Ensuring that a firm has sufficient liquidity to finance valuable projects that occur in the future is at the heart of the practice of financial management. Yet, while discussion of these issues goes back at least to Keynes (1936), a substantial literature on the ways in which firms manage...

We survey 1,050 CFOs in the U.S., Europe, and Asia to assess whether their firms are credit constrained during the global credit crisis of 2008. We study whether corporate spending plans differ conditional on this measure of financial constraint. Our evidence indicates that constrained firms...

Openness to trade is one factor that has been identified as determining whether a country is prone to sudden stops in capital inflow, currency crashes, or severe recessions. Some believe that openness raises vulnerability to foreign shocks, while others believe that it makes adjustment to crises...

This paper investigates whether leading indicators can help explain the cross-country incidence of the 2008-09 financial crisis. Rather than looking for indicators with specific relevance to the current crisis, the selection of variables is driven by an extensive review of more than eighty...

We develop a new dynamic factor model that allows us to jointly characterize global macroeconomic and financial cycles and the spillovers between them. The model decomposes macroeconomic cycles into the part driven by global and country-specific macro factors and the part driven by spillovers...