The accumulated experience of emerging markets over the last two decades has laid bare the tenuous links between external financial integration and faster growth on the one hand and the proclivity of such integration to fuel costly crises on the other. These crises have not gone without...

We examine how financial expansion and contraction cycles affect the broader economy through their impact on 8 real economic sectors in a panel of 28 countries over 1960-2005, paying particular attention to large, or sharp, contractions and magnifying and mitigating factors. Overall, the...