This book presents an economic survey of international capital mobility from the late nineteenth century to the present. The authors examine the theory and empirical evidence surrounding the fall and ...rise of integration in the world market. A discussion of institutional developments focuses on capital controls and the pursuit of macroeconomic policy objectives in shifting monetary regimes. The Great Depression emerges as the key turning point in recent history of international capital markets, and offers important insights for contemporary policy debates. Its principal legacy is that the return to a world of global capital is marked by great unevenness in outcomes regarding both risks and rewards of capital market integration. More than in the past, foreign investment flows largely from rich countries to other rich countries. Yet most financial crises afflict developing countries, with costs for everyone.
The financial crisis has refocused attention on money and credit fluctuations, financial crises, and policy responses. We study the behavior of money, credit, and macroeconomic indicators over the ...long run based on a new historical dataset for 14 countries over the years 1870–2008. Total credit has increased strongly relative to output and money in the second half of the twentieth century. Monetary policy responses to financial crises have also been more aggressive, but the output costs of crises have remained large. Credit growth is a powerful predictor of financial crises, suggesting that policymakers ignore credit at their peril. JEL: E32, E44, E52, G01, N10, N20
After the Global Financial Crisis, a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is ...unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This article, reconciles seemingly disparate estimates of multipliers within a unified and state-contingent framework. We achieve identification of causal effects with new propensity-score based methods for time series data. Using this novel approach, we show that austerity is always a drag on growth, and especially so in depressed economies: a 1% of GDP fiscal consolidation translates into a loss of 3.5% of real GDP over five years when implemented in a slump, rather than just 1.8% in a boom.
When Credit Bites Back JORDÀ, ÒSCAR; SCHULARICK, MORITZ; TAYLOR, ALAN M.
Journal of money, credit and banking,
December 2013, Letnik:
45, Številka:
s2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Using data on 14 advanced countries between 1870 and 2008 we document two key facts of the modern business cycle: relative to typical recessions, financial crisis recessions are costlier, and more ...credit-intensive expansions tend to be followed by deeper recessions (in financial crises or otherwise) and slower recoveries. We use local projection methods to condition on a broad set of macro-economic controls to study how past credit accumulation impacts key macro-economic variables such as output, investment, lending, interest rates, and inflation. The facts that we uncover lend support to the idea that financial factors play an important role in the modern business cycle.
The great mortgaging Jordà, Òscar; Schularick, Moritz; Taylor, Alan M. ...
Economic policy,
01/2016, Letnik:
31, Številka:
85
Journal Article
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Odprti dostop
This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic 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 the course of the twentieth century, driven by a sharp rise of mortgage lending to households. Household debt to asset ratios have risen substantially in many countries. Financial stability risks have been increasingly linked to real estate lending booms, which are typically followed by deeper recessions and slower recoveries. Housing finance has come to play a central role in the modern macroeconomy.
Longer-Run Economic Consequences of Pandemics Jordà, Òscar; Singh, Sanjay R; Taylor, Alan M
The review of economics and statistics,
01/2022, Letnik:
104, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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What are the medium- to long-term effects of pandemics? Do they differ from other economic disasters? We study major pandemics using rates of return on assets stretching back to the fourteenth ...century. Significant macroeconomic after-effects of pandemics persist for decades, with rates of return substantially depressed. The responses are in stark contrast to what happens after wars. Our findings also accord with wage and output responses, using more limited data, and are consistent with the neoclassical growth model: capital is destroyed in wars but not in pandemics; pandemics instead may induce more labor scarcity or more precautionary savings, or both.
The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015 Jordà, Òscar; Knoll, Katharina; Kuvshinov, Dmitry ...
The Quarterly journal of economics,
08/2019, Letnik:
134, Številka:
3
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Abstract
What is the aggregate real rate of return in the economy? Is it higher than the growth rate of the economy and, if so, by how much? Is there a tendency for returns to fall in the long run? ...Which particular assets have the highest long-run returns? We answer these questions on the basis of a new and comprehensive data set for all major asset classes, including housing. The annual data on total returns for equity, housing, bonds, and bills cover 16 advanced economies from 1870 to 2015, and our new evidence reveals many new findings and puzzles.
Trade and Uncertainty Novy, Dennis; Taylor, Alan M.
The review of economics and statistics,
10/2020, Letnik:
102, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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We offer a new explanation as to why international trade is so volatile in response to economic shocks. Our approach combines the idea of uncertainty shocks with international trade. Firms order ...inputs from home and foreign suppliers. In response to an uncertainty shock firms disproportionately cut orders of foreign inputs due to higher fixed costs. In the aggregate, this leads to a bigger contraction in international trade flows than in domestic activity, a magnification effect. We confront the model with newly compiled US import and industrial production data. Our results help to explain the Great Trade Collapse of 2008–2009.
In advanced economies, a century-long, near-stable ratio of credit to GDP gave way to rapid financialization and surging leverage in the last forty years. This “financial hockey stick” coincides with ...shifts in foundational macroeconomic relationships beyond the widely noted return of macroeconomic fragility and crisis risk. Leverage is correlated with central business cycle moments, which we can document thanks to a decade-long international and historical data collection effort. More financialized economies exhibit somewhat less real volatility, but also lower growth, more tail risk, as well as tighter real-real and real-financial correlations. International real and financial cycles also cohere more strongly. The new stylized facts that we discover should prove fertile ground for the development of a new generation of macroeconomic models with a prominent role for financial factors.
Conventional wisdom in economic history suggests that conflict between countries can be enormously disruptive of economic activity, especially international trade. We study the effects of war on ...bilateral trade with available data extending back to 1870. Using the gravity model, we estimate the contemporaneous and lagged effects of wars on the trade of belligerent nations and neutrals, controlling for other determinants of trade, as well as the possible effects of reverse casuality. We find large and persistent impacts of wars on trade, national income, and global economic welfare. We also conduct a general equilibrium comparative statics exercise that indicates costs associated with lost trade might be at least as large as the conventionally measured direct costs of war, such as lost human capital, as illustrated by case studies of World Wars I and II.