This paper presents a Markov chain model of the transmission of financial crises. Using bilateral trade data and a measure of exchange market pressure, a method to determine a set of transition probabilities that describes the crisis transmission dynamics is developed. The dynamics are characterized by one-month conditional crisis probabilities and the probability of a crisis occurring within o...

This paper develops a rational expectations model with multiple equilibrium unemployment rates where the price of capital may be unbounded above. I argue that this property is an important feature of any rational-agent explanation of a financial crisis, since for the expansion phase of the crisis to be rational, investors must credibly believe that asset prices could keep increasing forever wit...

In the 1990’s many economists criticized emerging market countries for their unwillingness to allow exchange rates to adjust. The ‘fear of floating’ was seen as severe distortion in the international monetary system, and a hindrance to good macroeconomic policy for these countries. In the worst case, a persistent defence of an exchange rate peg could lead to over -borrowing and precipitate curr...

The purpose of this paper is to use insights from the academic literature on crises to understand the role of liquidity in the current crisis. We focus on four of the crucial features of the crisis that we argue are related to liquidity provision. The first is the fall of the prices of AAA-rated tranches of securitized products below fundamental values. The second is the effect of the crisis on...

Bank crises are usually the result of dramatic swings in the value of assets held by the banking system. When asset values fall relative to liabilities, banks net worth is eroded, resulting in crisis. Minsky (1977) argues that such asset devaluations are a normal feature of the business cycle in market economies. As confidence builds during the business cycle, more and more agents engage in spe...

A Final Word page 7 D espite the robust growth of the U.S. economy in the late 1990s, uncertainties in the global marketplace and changes in the economic and competitive environment have forced companies everywhere to reevaluate their current ways of doing business. Who could have predicted the rapid impact of e-technology on business? Who would have anticipated the effects of regional financia...

Using a new country-level panel database, we explore effect of capital inflow surges, credit booms and financial fragility on the probability of banking crises. We find that booms increase the probability of a crisis only in relatively fragile financial systems. © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/lice...

Diamond and Dybvig (1983) provide a framework for coherent analysis of this phenomenon. In their model, agents may suffer idiosyncratic short-term liquidity needs. Without banks, they would not be able to enjoy the fruits of long-term investments. By offering demand-deposit contracts, banks enable short-term consumers to enjoy those fruits. Banks rely on the fact that only a forecastable fracti...

We employ the UTIP data set on the evolution of earnings inequality in manufacturing in the global economy to illuminate two questions. First, do regional patterns of similarity in the movement of large macroeconomic aggregates, such as real GDP, imply underlying similarities of industrial structure, so that knowledge of one national economy in a GDP cluster can reasonably be assumed to convey ...

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 ...