During the period 1991-93, Finland experienced the deepest economic downturn in an industrialized country since the 1930s. We argue that the culprit behind this Great Depression was the collapse of Finnish trade with the Soviet Union, because it induced a costly restructuring of the...

We propose a model that solves the crucial disconnect between business cycle models that treat default risk as an exogenous interest rate on working capital, and sovereign default models that treat output fluctuations as an exogenous process with ad-hoc default costs. The model explains observed...

An equilibrium model of financial crises driven by Irving Fisher's financial amplification mechanism features a pecuniary externality, because private agents do not internalize how the price of assets used for collateral respond to collective borrowing decisions, particularly when binding...

Emerging markets business cycle models treat default risk as part of an exogenous interest rate on working capital, while sovereign default models treat income fluctuations as an exogenous endowment process with ad-hoc default costs. We propose instead a general equilibrium model of both...

What are the stylized facts that characterize the dynamics of credit booms and the associated fluctuations in macro-economic aggregates? This paper answers this question by applying a method proposed in our earlier work for measuring and identifying credit booms to data for 61 emerging and...

The interaction between credit frictions, financial innovation, and a switch from optimistic to pessimistic beliefs played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis. This paper develops a quantitative general equilibrium framework in which this interaction drives the financial amplification...

This paper shows that the quantitative predictions of a DSGE model with an endogenous collateral constraint are consistent with key features of the emerging markets' Sudden Stops. Business cycle dynamics produce periods of expansion during which the ratio of debt to asset values raises enough to...

This paper proposes a methodology for measuring credit booms and uses it to identify credit booms in emerging and industrial economies over the past four decades. In addition, we use event study methods to identify the key empirical regularities of credit booms in macroeconomic aggregates and...