This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks' balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

Credit constraints that link a private agent's debt to market-determined prices embody a systemic credit externality that drives a wedge between competitive and (constrained) socially optimal equilibria, which induces private agents to ``overborrow". We quantify the effects of this externality...

This paper analyses the causes of banking crises by the way of a historical comparative case study. Moreover, the analysis draws on theories elaborated by the economist Hyman Minsky. The evidence presented suggests that the fundamental causes of the compared crises are found in the macroeconomic...

The 2007/8 financial crisis has reignited the debate about austerity economics and revealed that it is a highly contested yet poorly understood idea. This article locates the debate in its historical context, tracing it from the early 18th and 19th century Classical debates, which focused mainly...

Credit constraints that link a private agent's debt to market-determined prices embody a systemic credit externality that drives a wedge between competitive and (constrained) socially optimal equilibria, which induces private agents to ``overborrow". We quantify the effects of this externality...

In this paper, we develop a financial stress index for France that can be used as a real-time composite indicator for the state of financial stability in France. We take 17 financial variables from different market segments and extract a common stress component using a dynamic approximate factor...