This chapter describes a system, called the LEADS system, for providing market participants, regulators, and households with information on the reallocation of resources within, from, and to the household sector in response to macroeconomic events. The household sector is both a propagator of...

We propose a theory of regulatory arbitrage by banks and test it using trust preferred securities (TPS) issuance. From 1996 to 2007, U.S. banks in the aggregate increased their regulatory capital through issuance of TPS while their net issuance of common stock was negative due to repurchases. We...

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...

We show that the negative impact of financial crises on trade is magnified for destinations with longer time-to-ship. A simple model where exporters react to an increase in the probability of default of importers by increasing their export price and decreasing their export volumes to...

There is a demand for safe assets, either government bonds or private substitutes, for use as collateral. Government bonds are safe assets, given the government's power to tax, but their supply is driven by fiscal considerations, and does not necessarily meet the private demand for safe assets....

This paper provides a comprehensive, global database of deposit insurance arrangements as of 2013. We extend our earlier dataset by including recent adopters of deposit insurance and information on the use of government guarantees on banks' assets and liabilities, including during the recent...

This paper describes our construction of the Global Financial Development Database and uses the data to compare financial systems around the world. The database provides information on financial systems in 205 economies over the period from 1960 to 2010 and includes measures of (1) size of...

We use payroll data on 1.2 million bank employee years in the Austrian, German, and Swiss banking sector to identify incentive pay in the critical banking segments of treasury/capital market management and investment banking for 66 banks. We document an economically significant correlation of...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments' popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...