The financial crisis of 2008 highlights the importance of detecting crowded trades due to the risks they pose to the stability of the financial system and to the global economy. However, there is a perception that crowded trades are difficult to identify. To date, no single measure to capture...

This paper proposes a simple model to study the relationship between domestic institutions - financial system, corporate governance, and property rights protection - and patterns of international capital flows. It studies conditions under which financial globalization can be a substitute for...

The sharp, secular decline in the world real interest rate of the past thirty years suggests that the surge in global demand for financial assets outpaced the growth in their supply. We argue that this phenomenon was driven by: (i) faster growth in emerging markets, (ii) changes in the financial...

We measure how securitized assets, including mortgage-backed securities and other asset-backed securities, have shifted across financial institutions over this crisis and how the availability of financing has accommodated such shifts. Sectors dependent on repo financing - in particular, the...

Using the September 15, 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers as an exogenous shock to funding costs, we show that hedge funds act as liquidity providers. Hedge funds using Lehman as prime broker could not trade after the bankruptcy, and these funds failed twice as often as otherwise-similar funds...

Systemic risk is commonly used to describe the possibility of a series of correlated defaults among financial institutions---typically banks---that occur over a short period of time, often caused by a single major event. However, since the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, it has...

The hedge-fund industry has grown rapidly over the past two decades, offering investors unique investment opportunities that often reflect more complex risk exposures than those of traditional investments. In this article we present a selective review of the recent academic literature on hedge...

This paper analyzes the geographical preferences of hedge fund investors and the implication of these preferences for hedge fund performance. We find that funds of hedge funds overweight their investments in hedge funds located in the same geographical areas and that funds of funds with a...

The cross-country variation in the severity of the crisis was largely determined by three fundamentals: the strength of the banking system, the real appreciation, and the international liquidity of the country. We also find that the rule that links fundamentals to the crisis severity has been...

The concentration of risk within the financial system leads to systemic instability. We propose a theory to explain the structure of the financial system and show how it alters the risk taking incentives of financial institutions when the government optimally intervenes during crises. By issuing...