This paper compares the recent global crisis and recession to earlier international financial crises and recessions. Based on existing chronologies of banking, currency and debt crises we identify clusters of crises. We use an identification of extreme events and a weighting scheme based on real...

This paper shows that the Russian 1998 crisis had a big impact on capital flows to Emerging Market Economies, EMs, especially in Latin America, and that the impact of the Russian shock differs quite markedly across EMs. To illustrate this statement, we compare the polar cases of Chile and...

This study reviews broadly the experience of the last decade on crisis prevention and management. It seeks to draw greater attention to policy decisions that are made during the phase when capital inflows come to a sudden stop. Procrastination---the period of financing a balance of payments...

A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century's first global...

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...

We survey recent literature on the causes of the collapse in international trade during the 2008-2009 global recession. We argue that the evidence points to the collapse in aggregate expenditure, concentrated on trade-intensive durable goods, as the main driver of the trade collapse. Inventory...

While the 2008-2009 financial crisis originated in the United States, we witnessed steep declines in output, consumption and investment of similar magnitudes around the globe. This raises two questions. First, given the observed strong home bias in goods and financial markets, what can account...