Moderating spillovers from the advanced economies during the Great Moderation, the global information technology revolution, the influx of skilled immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the gradual buildup of robust and well-regulated financial institutions over decades after the...

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...

Three shocks, distinguished by whether their effects are permanent or transitory, are identified to characterize the post-war dynamics of aggregate consumer spending, labor earnings, and household wealth. The first shock accounts for virtually all of the variation in consumption; we argue that...

This paper assesses the East Asian Economies' openness to cross-border capital flows and exchange rate arrangements in the past decades, with the main focus on emerging market economies. Using Mundell's trilemma indexes, we note that the convergence of the three policy goals in East Asia toward...

This paper reviews recent developments in macro and finance on the relationship between financial risk and the real economy. We focus on three specific topics: the term structure of uncertainty, time variation - and specifically the long-term decline - in the variance risk premium, and time...

Using a new dataset on sectoral credit exposures covering financial and non-financial sectors in 115 economies over the period 1940-2014, we document the following evidence that corporate debt plays a key role in explaining boom-bust cycles, financial crises, and slow macroeconomic recoveries:...

The 1990s emerging-markets crises were characterized by sudden reversals in inflows of foreign capital followed by unusually large declines in current account deficits, private expenditures, production, and prices of nontradable goods relative to tradables. This paper shows that these Sudden...

The recent consensus view, that the gold standard was the leading cause of the worldwide Great Depression 1929-33, stems from two propositions: (1) Under the gold standard, deflationary shocks were transmitted between countries and, (2) for most countries, continued adherence to gold prevented...

We analyze a financial collapse, such as the one which occurred during the Great Depression, from the perspective of a monetary model with multiple equilibria. The economy we consider contains financial fragility due to increasing returns to scale in the intermediation process. Intermediaries...

Over the four years beginning in the summer of 1929, financial markets, labor markets and goods markets all virtually ceased to function. Throughout this, the government policymaking apparatus seemed helpless. Since the end of the Great Depression, macroeconomists have labored diligently in an...