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...

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries? growth would benefit from a reduction in tariffs and other barriers to trade. But a backlash against this view now suggests that trade policies have little or no impact on growth. If "getting policies right" is wrong or infeasible,...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks' balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

We examine the evolution of real per capita GDP around 100 systemic banking crises. Part of the costs of these crises owes to the protracted nature of recovery. On average, it takes about eight years to reach the pre-crisis level of income; the median is about 6 ½ years. Five to six years after...

After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...

In this paper, we document evidence on the synchronization of business cycles across 16 countries over the past century and a quarter, demarcated into four exchange rate regimes. We find using three different methodologies that there is a secular trend towards increased synchronization for much...

A study of business cycles defined as sequences of expansions and contractions in the level of general economic activity does not require trend estimation and elimination, but a study of growth cycles defined as sequences of high and low growth phases does. Major cyclical slowdowns and booms...

This paper asks whether the slow recovery of the US economy from the trough of the Great Recession was anticipated, and identifies some of the factors that contributed to surprises in the course of the recovery. It constructs a narrative using news reports and government announcements to...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

This paper examines the aftermath of financial crises in advanced countries in the four decades before the Great Recession. We construct a new series on financial distress in 24 OECD countries for the period 1967–2007. The series is based on assessments of the health of countries’ financial...