Remarks at New York University's Stern School of Business, New York City.

Remarks at Pace University, New York City.

In spite of large number of financial crises, often depicted as episodes of financial panic, the notion of panic in financial markets is not very well understood. Many have argued that in order to understand financial crises, and in particular panic events, we need to go beyond classic economic...

We use two data sets to study how country and firm characteristics affected firms’ financial constraints and their likelihood of survival during the early phase of the recent global financial crisis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA), a region that was especially hard hit. The first data...

The three Baltic countries have been able to combine, Estonia since 1992 and Latvia and Lithuania since 1994, (1) a fixed exchange rate,(2) liberalisation of the capital account before having a well-functioning and fully supervised financial system, and (3) very large current account deficits....

We study the effects of nominal debt on the optimal sequential choice of monetary and debt policy. When the stock of debt is nominal, the incentive to generate unanticipated inflation increases the cost of the outstanding debt even if no unanticipated inflation episodes occur in equilibrium....