Many have argued that the Great Recession of 2008 marked the end of the Great Moderation of the eighties and nineties. Through painstaking empirical analysis of the data, this paper shows this is not the case. Output volatility remains subdued despite the turmoil created by the Great Recession....

Much has been written about why economists failed to predict the latest financial and real crisis. Reading the recent literature, it seems that the crisis was so obvious that economists must have been blind when looking at data not to see it coming. In this paper, we analyze whether such claims...

This paper is one of the first to investigate the determinants of bond issuance by European banks. We use a unique database of around 50,000 bonds issued by 63 banks from 14 European countries to test explicitly a broad set of hypotheses on the drivers of bond issuance. The sample covers the two...

We examine the determinants of external stress episodes through probit analysis, focusing on the role of foreign liabilities in order to build an external crisis early warning indicator for a set of selected EMU countries. We use a panel country data spanning 1970-2011 from External Wealth...

Household debt in many advanced economies has increased significantly since the 1980s and accelerated in the years prior to the Great Recession, resulting in an aggregate reduction of saving rates in the developed economies. Some of those economies are now deleveraging, which may be affecting...

Despite France's importance in the interwar world economy, the scale and consequences of the French banking crises of 1930–1931 were never assessed quantitatively due to lack of data in the absence of banking regulation. Using a new dataset of individual balance sheets from more than 400...

A growing empirical literature has shown, based on structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) identified through sign restrictions, that unconventional monetary policies implemented after the outbreak of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) had expansionary macroeconomic effects. In a recent paper,...

This paper builds upon the existing empirical literature on the factors behind financial stability, focusing on the role of monetary policy design. In particular, it analyzes a sample of 79 countries in the period 1970 to 1999 to evaluate the effect of the choice of the central bank objectives...

This article analyzes the impact of the unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) of four major central banks (the Fed, ECB, BoE and BOJ) on the probability of future market crashes. We exploit the heterogeneity of different UMP actions to disentangle their influence on reducing the ex ante...