Between December 1994 and March 1999, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Russia and Brazil experienced major financial crises which were associated with massive recessions and extreme movements of exchange rates. Similar crises have threatened Turkey and Argentina (2000 and 2001) and...

The Great Depression is the canonical case of a widespread currency war, with more than 70 countries devaluing their currencies relative to gold between 1929 and 1936. What were the currency war's effects on trade flows? We use newly-compiled, high-frequency bilateral trade data and gravity...

Safe assets play a critical role in an(y) economy. A "safe asset" is an asset that is (almost always) valued at face value without expensive and prolonged analysis. That is, by design there is no benefit to producing (private) information about its value. And this is common knowledge....

Why did some countries learn to grow up to financial stability and others not? We explore this question by surveying the key determinants and major policy responses to banking, currency, and debt crises between 1880 and present. We divide countries into three groups: leaders, learners, and...

Using a novel, high frequency dataset on capital control actions in 16 emerging market economies (EMEs) from 2001 to 2012, we provide new insights into the domestic and multilateral effects of capital controls. Increases in capital account openness reduce monetary policy autonomy and increase...

We examine the first widespread use of capital controls in response to a global or regional financial crisis. In particular, we analyze whether capital controls mitigated capital flight in the 1930s and assess their causal effects on macroeconomic recovery from the Great Depression. We find...

In contrast to earlier recessions, the monetary regimes of many small economies have not changed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. This is due in part to the fact that many small economies continue to use hard exchange rate fixes, a reasonably durable regime. However, most of the...

Fire sales are forced sales of assets in which high-valuation bidders are sidelined, typically due to debt overhang problems afflicting many specialist bidders simultaneously. We overview theoretical and empirical research on asset fire sales, which shows how they can arise, how they can lead to...