Financial crises happen when: (i) nobody really understands what is going on (the collective cognition paradigm); (ii) some understand better and take advantage (the asymmetric information paradigm); (iii) everybody understands but crises are a natural part of the financial landscape (the market...

The global financial crisis brought public guarantees to the forefront of the policy debate. Based on a review of the theoretical foundations of public guarantees, this paper concludes that the commonly used justifications for public guarantees based solely on agency frictions (such as adverse...

The Subprime crisis largely resulted from failures to internalize systemic risk evenly across financial intermediaries and recognize the implications of Knightian uncertainty and mood swings. A successful reform of prudential regulation will need to integrate more harmoniously the three...

This paper examines the conceptual foundations of macroprudential policy by reviewing the literature on financial frictions from a policy perspective that systematically links state interventions to market failures. The method consists in gradually incorporating into the Arrow-Debreu world a...

This paper explores the conceptual foundations of macroprudential policy. It does so within a framework that gradually incorporates and interacts two types of frictions (principal-agent and collective action) with two forms of rationality (full and bounded), all in the context of aggregate...

The authors argue that short termism, dollarization, and the use of foreign jurisdictions are endogenous ways of coping with systemic risks prevalent in emerging markets. They represent a symptom at least as much as a problem. These coping mechanisms are jointly determined and the choice of one...

Financial crises can happen for a variety of reasons: (a) nobody really understands what is going on (the collective cognition paradigm); (b) some understand better than others and take advantage of their knowledge (the asymmetric information paradigm); (c) everybody understands, but crises are...

This paper analyzes the cyclical properties of worker flows in Brazil and Mexico, two important developing countries with large unregulated or “informal” sectors. It generates three stylized facts that are critical to the accurate modeling of the sector and which suggest the need to rethink...

This paper studies gross worker flows to explain the rising informality in Brazilian metropolitan labor markets from 1983 to 2002. This period covers two economic cycles, several stabilization plans, a far-reaching trade liberalization, and changes in labor legislation through the Constitutional...

This paper works at the interface of the literature exploring the raison d'etre of the informal labor market and that explaining the real exchange rate appreciations occurring in many Latin American countries during periods of reform. The authors first build a small country-Australian style...