We update Rose and Spiegel (2009a, b) and search for simple quantitative models of macroeconomic and financial indicators of the "Great Recession" of 2008-09. We use a cross-country approach and examine a number of potential causes that have been found to be successful indicators of crisis...

We study empirically the macroeconomic effects of an explicit de jure quantitative goal for monetary policy. Quantitative goals take three forms: exchange rates, money growth rates, and inflation targets. We analyse the effects on inflation of both having a quantitative target, and of hitting a...

This paper applies the Meese-Rogoff (1983a) methodology to the stock market. We compare the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of various time-series and fundamentals-based models of aggregate stock prices. We stick as close as possible to the original Meese-Rogoff sample and methodology. Just...

If one ranks cities by population, the rank of a city is inversely related to its size, a well-documented phenomenon known as Zipf's Law. Further, the growth rate of a city's population is uncorrelated with its size, another well-known characteristic known as Gibrat's Law. In this paper, I show...

We show that financial sector bailouts and sovereign credit risk are intimately linked. A bailout benefits the economy by ameliorating the under-investment problem of the financial sector. However, increasing taxation of the non-financial sector to fund the bailout may be inefficient since it...

Three main vantage points are brought together in this paper: (1) Israel’s relatively good economic performance in recent years – at least, in comparison with other Western countries that have still not emerged from the recession; (2) motivations for the wave of social protests that erupted...

This paper analyzes the effects of financial liberalization on growth and volatility at the industry level in a large sample of countries. We estimate the impact of liberalization on production, employment, firm entry, capital accumulation, and productivity, using both de facto and de jure...

Recent literature has documented the sensitivity of unit root tests to failure to account for structural change. This paper reconsiders international evidence on the unit root hypothesis while allowing for two structural breaks. We find evidence of two breaks in three-quarters of the data,...

Do legal institutions governing financial contracts affect the nature of real investments in the economy? We develop a simple model and provide evidence that the answer to this question is yes. We consider a levered firm's choice of investment between innovative and conservative technologies, on...