In this paper, we review three branches of theoretical literature on financial crises. The first one deals with banking crises originating from coordination failures among bank creditors. The second one deals with frictions in credit and interbank markets due to problems of moral hazard and adverse selection. The third one deals with currency crises. We discuss the evolutions of these branches ...

The process of financial globalization has given rise to an increase in the frequency of financial crises. With it, there has also been a surge in research about financial crises. One of the key questions in this area is whether crises are triggered by fundamentals or come as a result of panic. Observing real-world events, many prominent researchers, including Friedman and Schwartz (1963) and K...

EGINNING WITH THE stock market crash in October 1929, the United States suffered a series of financial crises that mark the Great Depression. In each crisis, the number of bank failures and the declines in bank reserves, the money stock and economic activity were greater than in the preceding episodes. Many researchers investigating the causes of financial crises during the Great Depression hav...

The importance of currency and maturity mismatches in the debt structure of emerging markets is an issue that can hardly be overemphasized. Yet, while many papers have explained how imbalances in the asset and liability structure of emerging markets can cause currency and financial crises, the factors that may have triggered such imbalances in the first place have received relatively little att...

*Correspondence: Sgouris Sgouridis, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 54224, Abu Dhabi, UAE e-mail: [email protected] The universal adoption of fiat currencies and of the fractional reserve banking system coincided with access to and ability to utilize energy-dense fossil fuels leading to unprecedented rates of economic expansion.The depletion of economically recoverabl...