The global financial crisis that erupted in 2008, coupled with food and fuel price volatility, are likely to affect developing countries, and within them the vast majority of the world’s poor population in profound ways. Based on both experiences in previous crises and the information that is available thus far on the current crises, this working brief will examine the channels through which th...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the relative contribution of a wide array of determinants to outbreak of financial crises in the EU candidate countries (Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey) and to identify the best-performing early warning indicators of financial crises. We have estimated a binomial logit model of the three EU candidate countries for the period 2005Q1 to 2009Q4 using actua...

The purpose of this conference on real estate indicators and financial stability is “to promote the development of reliable, timely and consistent statistics on real estate prices” in order to support policy initiatives to promote macroeconomic stability. The recent volatility of asset prices and the Asian financial crisis of 1997 have focused attention on the role of asset markets and, in part...

The literature on rare disasters shows that low probability events can explain high, time-varying risk premia. I find that large spikes in risk premia occur around financial crises but not around other disasters such as wars. A model with financial intermediaries generates endogenous financial crises that quantitatively match those in the data, while also replicating high equity risk premia and...

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...