Can central banks defuse rising stability risks in financial booms by leaning against the wind with higher interest rates? This paper studies the state-dependent effects of monetary policy on financial crisis risk. Based on the near-universe of advanced economy financial cycles since the 19th century, we show that discretionary leaning against the wind policies during […]

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This paper studies the synchronization of financial cycles across 17 advanced economies over the past 150 years. The comovement in credit, house prices, and equity prices has reached historical highs in the past three decades. The sharp increase in the comovement of global equity markets is particularly notable. We demonstrate that fluctuations in risk premiums, […]

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with Yao Chen. External adjustment under the Gold Standard – a fixed exchange rate regime – was associated with few, if any, output costs. This paper evaluates how flexible prices, international migration, and monetary policy contributed to this benign adjustment experience. For this purpose, we build and estimate an open economy model for the Gold […]

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Journal of Applied Econometrics, March 2017, Volume 32, Issue 2. To improve the detection of the economic ”danger zones” from which severe banking crises emanate, this paper introduces classification tree ensembles to the banking crisis forecasting literature. I show that their out-of-sample performance in forecasting binary banking crisis indicators surpasses current best-practice early warning systems […]

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