This study analyses two hypotheses that ascribe the 2008 US financial crisis to capital inflows. The Asian savings glut hypothesis posits that net inflows into high-grade US public bonds from countries running current account surpluses led to the housing boom and bust. An excess of savings over...

Modern financial crises are difficult to explain because they do not always involve bank runs, or the bank runs occur late. For this reason, the first year of the Great Depression, 1930, has remained a puzzle. Industrial production dropped by 20.8 percent despite no nationwide bank run. Using...

We study key vulnerabilities of the US Primary Dealers during the 2007-08 financial crisis. Dealers' exposure to risky assets drives the repo run; importantly, repos become sensitive to counterparty risk only at the height of the crisis. Further, the way in which dealers use repo funding exposes...

How much did shocks to household credit supply reduce employment in the Great Recession? To answer this question, I provide a general foundation for shift-share credit supply shocks, which shows that they are useful for accounting, but direct estimates may be biased. Combining the shift-share...

This article takes advantage of access to confidential matched bank-firm data relative to the Belgian economy to investigate how employment decisions of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been affected by credit constraints in the wake of the Great Recession. Variability in banks'...

In Korea, the IMF-supported program, approved in late 1997, focused on financial sector restructuring, corporate governance, capital account liberalization, labor market reforms and trade liberalization. As in Thailand, it soon became clear that the IMF program underestimated the severity and...

The COVID-19 crisis paralyzed huge parts of the planet in weeks. It not only infected the population but injected a gargantuan dose of uncertainty into the system. In that regard, as in many others, it is a phenomenon without precedent. As of the time of writing (May–June 2020), we are...

This paper analyzes bank stock prices around the world to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the banking sector. Using a global database of policy responses during the crisis, the paper also examines the role of financial sector policy announcements on the performance of bank stocks....

This paper analyses the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the share prices of gold firms, whose activities are spread across gold exploration, project development and gold mining with markedly different risk characteristics. We find evidence for COVID-induced stock market contagion leading...