The Great Depression is infamous for banking panics, which were a symptomatic of a phenomenon that scholars have labeled a contagion of fear. Using geocoded, microdata on bank distress, we develop metrics that illuminate the incidence of these events and how banks that remained in operation...

The crises in Mexico, Thailand, and Russia in the 1990s spread quite rapidly to countries as far apart as South Africa and Pakistan. In the aftermath of these crises, many emerging economies lost access to international capital markets. Using data on international primary issuance, this paper...

This paper analyzes the co-movement of the exchange rates and the stock prices from the viewpoint of contagion among the eight countries in the region during the period of Asian currency crisis, 1997-1999. Ito and Hashimoto (2002; NBER working paper) proposed a new definition of high-frequency...

In this paper, we extend the bank run literature to an open economy model. We show that a foreign banking system, by raising deposit rates in the presence of a domestic banking panic, may generate sufficient liquid resources to acquire assets sold by the domestic banking system at bargain...

International financial integration helps to diversify risk but also may increase the trans- mission of crises across countries. We provide a quantitative analysis of this trade-off in a two-country general equilibrium model with endogenous portfolio choice and collateral con- straints....

We propose a unified model of limited market integration, asset-price determination, leveraging, and contagion. Investors and firms are located on a circle, and access to markets involves participation costs that increase with distance. Despite the ex-ante symmetry of investors, their strategies...

Recent financial crises in emerging markets have been followed by temporary but substantial losses in output. This paper explores the possibility that threats of such losses are the dominant incentive for repayment of international debt. In this environment private debtors and creditors have...

The termination of a representative financial firm due to excessive leverage may lead to substantial bankruptcy costs. A government in the tradition of Ramsey (1927) may be inclined to provide transfers to the firm so as to prevent its liquidation and the associated deadweight costs. It is shown...

A firm's termination leads to bankruptcy costs. This may create an incentive for outside stakeholders or the firm's debtholders to bail out the firm as bankruptcy looms. Because of this implicit guarantee, firm shareholders have an incentive to increase volatility in order to exploit the...