This paper argues that bank runs on the shadow banking system was a significant factor in the spread of subprime losses to the overall financial system. Highly leveraged shadow banks with illiquid assets suffered from the loss spiral effect whereby they were forced to deleverage due to higher...

I develop a framework of the buildup and outbreak of financial crises in an asymmetric information setting. In equilibrium, two distinct economic states arise endogenously: "normal times", periods of modest investment, and "booms", periods of expansionary investment. Normal times occur when the...

Credit spreads display occasional spikes and are more strongly countercyclical in times of financial stress. Financial crises are extreme cases of this nonlinear behavior, featuring skyrocketing credit spreads, sharp losses in bank equity, and deep recessions. We develop a macroeconomic model...

We assess the relationship between finance and growth over the period 1980-2014. We estimate a cross-country growth regression for 48 countries during 20 periods of 15 years starting in 1980 (to 1995) and ending in 1999 (to 2014). We use OLS and IV estimations and we find that: 1) overall...

Introducing shadow banks into the economy lowers the money supply measured as the sum of cash and deposits, while the amount of payment liquidity does not decrease as long as the liabilities of shadow banks remain fully liquid. At the same time, the total amount of credit available to firms...

Financial intermediaries and markets can alleviate market frictions through producing information and risk sharing in different ways. In practice, the structure of financial systems can be bank-based or market-based, varying across countries. The influence of financial structure on economic...

We examine the determinants of financial development using our global sample and employing a rich set of measures of financial development that assess the degree of depth, access, stability and efficiency of financial intermediaries. We use Bayesian model averaging to test competing theories...