In fighting a financial crisis, opacity (keeping the names of banks borrowing at emergency lending facilities secret) and stigma (the cost of having a bank's name revealed) are desirable to restore confidence. Lending facilities raise the perceived average quality of all banks' assets. Opacity...

This paper provides an asymmetric information analysis of the recent East Asian crisis. It then outlines several lessons from this crisis. First, there is a strong rationale for an international lender of last resort. Second, without appropriate conditionality for this lending, the moral hazard...

The 1990s Sudden Stops in emerging markets were a harbinger for the 2008 global financial crisis. During Sudden Stops, countries lost access to credit, causing abrupt current account reversals, and suffered Great Recessions. This paper reviews a class of models that yields quantitative...

Financial intermediaries borrow in order to lend. When credit is increasing rapidly, the traditional deposit funding (core liabilities) is supplemented with other funding (non-core liabilities). We explore the hypothesis that monetary aggregates reflect the size of non-core and core liabilities...

In this paper we characterize empirically the comovements of macro variables typically observed in middle income countries, as well as the boom-bust cycle' that has been observed during the last two decades. We find that many countries that have liberalized their financial markets, have...

This paper develops a framework for inferring common Markov-switching components in a panel data set with large cross-section and time-series dimensions. We apply the framework to studying similarities and differences across U.S. states in the timing of business cycles. We hypothesize that there...

In this paper we present evidence from high-frequency data collections dedicated to tracking the effects of the financial crisis and great recession on American households. These data come from surveys that we conducted in the American Life Panel - an Internet survey run by RAND Labor and...

We document some key facts about aggregate consumption and its subcomponents over time. We then document the behavior of some important determinants of consumption, such as consumers' expectations about their future income, and changes in the consumers' wealth positions. Finally, we use a simple...

During the recession of 2008-9, labor hours fell sharply, while wages and output per hour rose. Some, but not all, of the productivity and wage increase can be attributed to changing quality of the workforce. The rest of the increase appears to be due to increases in production inputs other than...

The 2008-2009 crisis was characterized by an unprecedented degree of international synchronization as all major industrialized countries experienced large macroeconomic contractions around the date of Lehman bankruptcy. At the same time countries also experienced large and synchronized...