There are striking and terrifying similarities between the sudden failure of a heart and that of a financial system. In the medical literature, the former is referred to as a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). By analogy, I refer to its financial counterpart as a sudden financial arrest (SFA). In this...

The global financial crisis of 2008 was a crisis affecting both the financial sector and the “real economy.” This paper analyzes the transmission of unexpected shocks from the financial sector in the US to other countries and sectors. We test the hypothesis that the financial crisis spread...

This paper analyzes the incidences of sector-specific contagion during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. The empirical analysis comprising ten sectors in 25 major developed and emerging stock markets shows that the crisis led to an increased co-movement of returns and thus contagion...

Will the world run out of 'safe assets' and what would be the consequences on global financial stability? We argue that in a world with competing private stores of value, the global economic system tends to favor the riskiest ones. Privately produced stores of value cannot provide sufficient...

This study examines whether Bitcoin, a digital decentralized currency, can become a viable alternative to fiat currencies. Bitcoin currently does not fulfill the criteria of being a currency because it does not function as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. Bitcoin's...

We quantify the impact of barriers to international investment, using a novel multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous investors and imperfect capital mobility. Our model yields a gravity equation for bilateral foreign asset positions. We estimate this gravity equation...

We show that very little is needed to create liquidity under-supply in equilibrium. Credit constraints on demand by themselves can cause an under-supply of liquidity, without the uncertainty, intermediation, asymmetric information or complicated international financial framework used in other...

We define liquidity as the flexibility to move goods (money) from one project (investment) to another. We show that credit constraints on demand by themselves can cause an under-supply of liquidity, without the uncertainty, intermediation, asymmetric information or complicated international...