In this paper we argue that the persistent global imbalances, the subprime crisis, and the volatile oil and asset prices that followed it, are tightly interconnected. They all stem from a global environment where sound and liquid financial assets are in scarce supply

We estimate the impact of COVID-19 on business failures for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) using firm-level data in seventeen countries. Absent government support, the failure rate of SMEs would have increased by 9.1 percentage points, representing 4.6 percent of private sector...

One of the basic motives for saving is the accumulation of wealth to insure future welfare. Both introspection and extant research on consumption insurance find that people face substantial risks that they do not fairly pool. In theory, the consumption and wealth accumulation of price-taking...

We provide an overview of the recent developments of the literature on the determinants of long term capital flows, global imbalances and valuation effects. We present the main stylized facts of the new international financial landscape in which external balance sheets of countries have grown in...

International currencies fulfill different roles in the world economy with important synergies across those roles. We explore the implications of currency hegemony for the external balance sheet of the United States, the process of international adjustment, and the predictability of the US...

We estimate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on business failures among small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in seventeen countries using a large representative firm-level database. We use a simple model of firm cost-minimization and measure each firm's liquidity shortfall during and after...

Despite a formal 'no-bailout clause', we estimate significant net present value transfers from the European Union to Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, ranging from roughly 0.5% (Ireland) to 43% (Greece) of 2011 output during the recent Eurozone crisis. We propose a model to analyze...