Interconnections between banking crises and fiscal crises have a long history. We document the long-run evolution from classic banking panics towards modern banking crises where financial guarantees are associated with crisis resolution. Recent crises feature a feedback loop between bank...

The recent global crisis has sparked interest in the relationship between income inequality, credit booms, and financial crises. Rajan (2010) and Kumhof and Rancière (2011) propose that rising inequality led to a credit boom and eventually to a financial crisis in the US in the first decade of...

The classical gold standard period, 1880-1913, witnessed deep economic integration. High capital imports were related to better growth performance but may also have created greater volatility via financial crises. I first document the substantial output losses from various types of crises. I...

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...

Foreign currency debt is widely believed to increase risks of financial crisis, especially after being implicated as a cause of the East Asian crisis in the late 1990s. In this paper, we study the effects of foreign currency debt on currency and debt crises and its indirect short and long run...

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...

What is the role of foreign currency debt in precipitating financial crises? In this paper we assemble data for nearly 30 countries between 1880 and 1913 and examine debt crises, currency crises, banking crises and twin crises. We pay special attention to the role of foreign currency and gold...

We focus on two international aspects of the Great Depression--financial crises and international trade-- and try to discern lessons for the current economic crisis. Both downturns featured global banking crises which were generated by boom-slump macroeconomic cycles. During both crises, world...

What is the role of foreign currency debt in precipitating financial crises? In this paper we compare the 1880 to 1913 period to recent experience. We examine debt crises, currency crises, banking crises and the interrelation between these varieties of crises. We pay special attention to the...