Financial crisis are often associated with an endogenous credit reversal fol- lowed by a fall in asset prices and failures of financial institutions. To account for this sequence of events, this paper constructs a model where the excess risk-taking of portfolio investors leads to a bubble in...

Financial crises are often associated with an endogenous credit reversal followed by a fall in asset prices and serious disruptions in the financial sector. To account for this sequence of events, this paper constructs a model where the excessive risk-taking of portfolio investors leads to a...

Credit market imperfections have been blamed for the depth and persistence of the Great Depression in the US. Could similar mechanisms have played a role in ending the East Asian miracle? After a brief account of the nature of the recent crises, we use Kiyotaki and Moore’s (1997) model of...

The prolonged investment decline in post-Asian crisis emerging Asia, in contrast to the swift recovery of economic growth, has remained a puzzle. This paper shows that the post-crisis investment recession has been mainly concentrated in the nontradable sector, and hypothesizes that the slowdown...

During the Subprime crisis the entire banking industry risked collapsing under an unprecedented lack of liquidity. This work tries and find what channel allowed a relatively small systemic shock, the increased mortgage delinquency in the US housing market, to spread worldwide with such a...

Using an extensive data set on corporate bond defaults in the US from 1866 to 2010, we study the macroeconomic effects of bond market crises and contrast them with those resulting from banking crises. During the past 150 years, the US has experienced many severe corporate default crises in which...

This paper discusses how financial crises in emerging Asia and Japan worked as catalysts for legal reforms. Findings show that six Asian countries pursued significant legal and judicial reforms following financial crises in 1997–1998, but indicators that measure the quality of legal...

Why do some banks fail in financial crises while others survive? This paper answers this question by analysing the consequences of the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s for 143 banks, of which 37 failed. Banks’ choices in balance sheet composition, corporate governance practices and...

The failure and near-collapse of some of the largest dealer banks on Wall Street in 2008 highlighted the marked vulnerability of the industry. Dealer banks are financial intermediaries that make markets for many securities and derivatives. Like standard banks, dealer banks may derive the funding...

This article presents a modification of Merton’s (1976) ruin option pricing model to estimate the implied probability of default from stock and option market prices. To test the model, we analyze all global financial firms with traded options in the US and focus on the subprime mortgage crisis...