During financial crises, investors demand large amounts of government-backed assets. What constitutes an orderly flight-to-liquidity? Studying how suppliers of government-backed safe assets respond to heightened demand during a crisis is challenging due to a multitude of confounding factors. In...

Do financial crises radicalize voters? We analyze a canonical case – Germany during the Great Depression. After a severe banking crisis in 1931, caused by foreign shocks and political inaction, radical voting increased sharply in the following year. Democracy collapsed six months later. We...

The Federal Home Loan Banks are the less well-known siblings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Since these government-sponsored enterprises were created in 1932, changes in housing finance markets have rendered largely irrelevant their original purpose of increasing the availability of mortgages....