This paper surveys the recent empirical literature on historical banking crises, defined as events taking place before 1980. Advances in data collection and identification have provided new insights into the causes and consequences of crises both immediately and over the long run. We highlight...

We study sovereign external debt crises over the past 200 years, with a focus on creditor losses, or "haircuts". Our sample covers 327 sovereign debt restructurings with external private creditors over 205 default spells since 1815. Creditor losses vary widely (from none to 100%), but the...

The sub-prime crisis has shown a harsh spotlight on the practices of securities underwriters, which provided too many complex securities that proved to ultimately have little value. This uproar calls attention to the fact that the literature on intermediaries has carefully analyzed their...

We show that a June 2002 reform in Morningstar's mutual fund rating methodology led to substantial drop in the profitability of momentum-related asset pricing factors. Before the reform, funds pursuing the same investment style had correlated ratings heavily influenced by recent style...

For decades credit rating agencies were viewed as trusted arbiters of creditworthiness and their ratings as important tools for managing risk. The common narrative is that the value of ratings was compromised by the evolution of the industry to a form where issuers pay for ratings. In this paper...

We study the effects of the first-ever ratings for corporate securities. In 1909, John Moody published a book that partitioned the majority of listed railroad bonds into letter-graded ratings based on his assessments of their credit risk. These ratings had no regulatory implications and were...

Foreign banks pulled significant funding from their U.S. branches during the Great Recession. We estimate that the average-sized branch experienced a 12 percent net internal fund "withdrawal," with the fund transfer disproportionately bigger for larger branches. This internal shock to the...

This paper develops a partial-identification methodology for analyzing self-selection into alternative compensation schemes in a laboratory environment. We formulate a model of self-selection in which individuals select the compensation scheme with the largest expected valuation, which depends...

Robustness checks, such as adding controls or sample splits, are a standard feature of reduced-form empirical research. Because of computational costs of reestimating alternative models, they are much less common in structural research using simulation-based methods. We propose a simple...