Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed...

Aus der Finanzkrise ist über die Währungskrise längst eine weltweite Bedrohung des Finanzsystems geworden. Die akuten Brandherde der globalen Finanzstruktur scheinen zwar immer wieder unter Kontrolle, doch unter der Oberfläche brodelt es weiter. Genau hier setzt mit Raghuram Rajan einer der...

We examine the importance of corporate assets in supporting debt. Prior studies typically see only secured debt as asset backed, while the rest is deemed cash flow based. This implies only a small fraction of US debt is asset backed. Yet because corporations often resist offering security...

Central bank balance sheet expansion is financed by commercial banks. It involves not just a substitution of liquid central bank reserves for other assets held by commercial banks, but also a counterpart alteration in commercial bank liabilities, such as in short-term deposits issued to finance...

Does credit availability exacerbate asset price inflation? What channels could it work through? What are the long run consequences? In this paper we address these questions by examining the farm land price boom (and bust) in the United States that preceded the Great Depression. We find that...