This paper develops a restrictive procedure for evaluating economic policy decisions, by comparing actual economic history to a simulated history where a specific policy decision is replaced with a counterfactual, but credible, alternative. Our procedure is theoretically straightforward, but...

Although the US credit crisis precipitated it, the Irish credit crisis is an identifiably separate one, which might have occurred in the absence of the U.S. crash. The distinctive differences between them are notable. Almost all the apparent causal factors of the U.S. crisis are missing in the...

This paper develops a simple model of the gap between socially and privately optimal bank lending when a bank has an overhang of impaired loans, and analyzes government policies designed to close this gap. The impaired loans have risky cash flows but observable market values. A number of basic...