A central role for economic policy involves understanding and reducing the impact of unexpected,extreme events. In this paper, we develop a simple economic framework with latentregime switches. This framework explains why investors and policymakers can decide not tohedge against extreme events,...

A central role for economic policy involves reducing the incidence of systemic downturns,when key economic variables experience joint extreme events. In this paper,we empirically analyze such asymmetric dependence using two approaches, correlationsand copulas. We document four findings. First,...