with Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, Lars P. Feld, Werner Heun, Gerhard Illing, Gebhard Kirchgässner, Jürgen Kocka, Wolfgang Streeck, Uwe Wagschal, Stefanie Walter, Carl Christian von Weizsäcker. Seit der schweren Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise 2007/2008, der Verankerung der Schuldenbremse im Grundgesetz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 2009 und der Schuldenkrise einiger Eurostaaten seit 2010 wird das schon lange virulente Streitthema „Staatsschulden“ […]
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 […]
This article examines the long-term consequences of a historical human capital intervention. The Jesuit order founded religious missions amongst the Guarani, in modern-day Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Missionaries instructed indigenous inhabitants in reading, writing and various crafts, before their expulsion in 1767. Using archival records and municipal census data, I demonstrate that educational attainment was […]
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 […]
with William F. Maloney — Documento CEDE, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper. This paper offers the first systematic historical evidence on the role of a central factor in modern growth theory – the engineer. We collect cross-country and state level data on the population share of engineers for the Americas, and county level data […]
I investigate the effects of the monetary rate, the interest rate set by the Central Bank, on bank risk taking by examining a sample of loan contracts secured by shares and extended by the North and South Wales Bank between 1881 and 1894. Collateralization by shares allows me to construct a measure of ex ante […]