I analyze the behavior of risk premia in financial crises, wars, and recessions in an international panel spanning over 140 years and over 14 countries. I document that expected returns, or risk premia, increase substantially in financial crises, but not in the other episodes. Asset prices...

We study the behavior of credit and output across a financial crisis cycle using in- formation from credit spreads and credit growth. We show the transition into a crisis occurs with a large increase in credit spreads, indicating that crises involve a dramatic shift in expectations and are a...

Modern financial crises are difficult to explain because they do not always involve bank runs, or the bank runs occur late. For this reason, the first year of the Great Depression, 1930, has remained a puzzle. Industrial production dropped by 20.8 percent despite no nationwide bank run. Using...

Banks' relationships with their depositors are valuable when depositors remain sticky, but this value evaporates if they leave. This tension makes banks fragile when interest rates increase and long-term asset values are depressed. In this scenario, if all of its depositors leave, the bank...

The pre-crisis financial architecture was a system of mobile collateral. Safe debt, whether government bonds or privately produced bonds, ie asset-backed securities, could be traded, posted as collateral, and rehypothecated, moving to its highest value use. Since the financial crisis, regulatory...

In the face of the Lucas Critique, economic history can be used to evaluate policy. We use the experience of the U.S. National Banking Era to evaluate the most important bank regulation to emerge from the financial crisis, the Bank for International Settlement's liquidity coverage ratio (LCR)...