It is well known that equity, currency, or banking crises generate substantial real costs for the country in which they occur. Authorities and financial market participants have often been concerned that these crises would spill over or spread, leading to financial system volatility or crises elsewhere in the world. The recent Mexican, Asian, and Russian crises are examples where shocks origina...

An increase in the frequency and intensity of environmental crises associated with accelerating human-induced global change is of substantial concern to policy makers. The potential impacts, especially on the poor, are exacerbated in an increasingly connected world that enables the emergence of crises that are coupled in time and space. We discuss two factors that can interact to contribute to ...

In the wake of the global financial crisis much attention has been devoted to the role of complexity of bank linkages in the transmission of shocks. We shed light on this issue using a rich dataset on international syndicated bank lending matched with bank financial information. To study how financial crises spread through the global banking network, we distinguish among channels such as banks'...

THE RECENT FINANCIAL CRISES IN EAST Asia, Russia, and elsewhere, and the earlier crisis in Mexico, have heightened interest in the subject of short-term borrowing by developing countries and the benefits and risks associated with such debt.1 This chapter examines the growth and determinants of short-term debt from international banks, the behavior of such debt during economic shocks, and its as...

Financial crises are supposed to be rare events, yet they occur quite often. According to Reinhart and Rogoff (2009), investors suffer from “this time is different” syndrome, failing to see crises coming because they do not recognize similarities among the different pre-crisis bubbles. As a result, each crisis surprises investors. Economists typically model financial crises as responses to shoc...