Short-term collateralized debt, such as demand deposits and money market instruments - private money, is efficient if agents are willing to lend without producing costly information about the collateral backing the debt. When the economy relies on such informationally-insensitive debt, firms...

"After the Great Depression John Maynard Keynes led the way in building a new macroeconomic framework to deal with that unprecedented economic reality. Ten years after our own crisis, however, macroeconomics has not come to terms with how to grapple with the idea of financial crises in its...

A financial crisis is an event of sudden information acquisition about the collateral backing short-term debt in credit markets. When investors see a financial crisis coming, however, they react by more intensively acquiring information about firms in stock markets, revealing those that are...

"After the financial crisis of 2007-2008, analysts continue to question the security of banking sectors in nations in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Why do such crises recur? What is it about the accumulation of bank debt that potentially jeopardizes national and global banking...

Economic variables are known to move asymmetrically over the business cycle: quickly and sharply during crises, but slowly and gradually during recoveries. Not known is the fact that this asymmetry is stronger in countries with less-developed financial systems. This new fact is documented using...