It is a cliché that the world has become more connected, but the financial crisis and the boom that preceded it have focused attention on the global factors behind credit growth and capital flows. Calvo, Leiderman and Reinhart (1993, 1996) famously distinguished the global "push" factors for...

We study a contracting model of leverage and balance sheet size for financial intermediaries that fund their activities through collateralized borrowing. Leverage and balance sheet size increase together when measured risks decrease. When the loss distribution is exponential, the behavior of...