"If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it." The economic history of the world is replete with recessions and depressions. From the bursting of the British South Sea Bubble and the French Mississippi Bubble in 1720 (which at least one economic historian claims delayed the industrial revolution by 50 years) to the in...

Available online 23 July 2010 We investigate the effectiveness of capital controls in insulating economies from currency crises, focusing in particular on both direct and indirect effects of capital controls and how these relationships may have changed over time in response to global financial liberalization and the greater mobility of international capital. We predict the likelihood of currenc...

The past two decades have seen extensive analyses of the taxonomic severity of major biodiversity crises in geologic time. In contrast, we propose here an alternative analysis of the ecological severity of biodiversity crises. It is clear that the ecological impacts of the five Phanerozoic biodiversity crises were not all the same. Ranking the five Phanerozoic biodiversity crises by ecological ...

Economic crises are complex events that affect behavioral patterns (including alcohol consumption) via opposing mechanisms. With this realist systematic review, we aimed to investigate evidence from studies of previous or ongoing crises on which mechanisms (How?) play a role among which individuals (Whom?). Such evidence would help understand and predict the potential impact of economic crises ...

We distinguish two types of debt crises: those that are the outcome of exogenous shocks (to productivity growth for instance) and those that are endogenously created, either by self-fulfilling panic in financial markets or by the reckless behavior of “Panglossian” borrowers. After Krugman, we characterize as “Panglossian” those borrowers who only focus on their best growth prospects, anticipati...

The rapidly evolving global economy as well as new challenges with economic and social implications make the problem of financial crises, including currency crises, extremely important in the current situation. Especially given the fact that the crises affect various countries and regions of the world. Serious currency crashes have occurred in developing countries with marked structural problem...

This paper explores the role played by government guarantees to banks’ foreign creditors as a root cause of self-fulfilling twin banking-currency crises. We develop a general equilibrium model in which such guarantees lead to these types of crises. Absent government guarantees, such crises are not possible. The model has three key properties. First, in the presence of government guarantees bank...