with Oscar Jordà and Alan M. Taylor — Journal of Economic Perspectives (forthcoming). Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history […]

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 […]

with Oscar Jordà and Alan M. Taylor — Economic Policy, Volume 31, Issue 85, pp. 107 – 15. This paper unveils a new resource for macro-economic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in […]

German Economic Review, Vol. 15, Issue 1, pp. 191–207. In this study, I draw on recent comparative studies of the macroeconomic history of advanced economies since 1870. I show that while both public and private debts have increased markedly, private, not public debts have climbed to historically unprecedented levels. Outside war times, financial crises have […]