An important challenge worthy of NSF support is to quantify systemic financial risk. There are at least three major components to this challenge: modeling, measurement, and data accessibility. Progress on this challenge will require extending existing research in many directions and will require...

We propose several econometric measures of systemic risk to capture the interconnectedness among the monthly returns of hedge funds, banks, brokers, and insurance companies based on principal components analysis and Granger-causality tests. We find that all four sectors have become highly...

The recent financial crisis has generated many distinct perspectives from various quarters. In this article, I review a diverse set of 21 books on the crisis, 11 written by academics, and 10 written by journalists and one former Treasury Secretary. No single narrative emerges from this broad and...

Historical accounts of financial crises suggest that fear and greed are the common denominators of these disruptive events: periods of unchecked greed eventually lead to excessive leverage and unsustainable asset-price levels, and the inevitable collapse results in unbridled fear, which must...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market---rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities---led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

We apply text-matching techniques to trace the trajectory of policy ideas contained in four bills related to the Financial Crisis during the 110th (2007-08) and 111th (2009-10) Congresses. By identifying the first appearance of bill text, visualizing the results, and constructing metrics to...