Recently added articles from Brookings Papers on Economic Activity:
Editors' summary.
Sep 22, 2008 ... THE BROOKINGS PANEL ON ECONOMIC ACTIVITY held its eighty-sixth conference in Washington, D.C., on September 11 and 12, 2008. Several of the conference papers examine aspects of the current financial crisis: the relationships among recent global financial imbalances, mortgage lending, and ...
Financial crash, commodity prices, and global imbalances.
Sep 22, 2008; ... The current financial crisis has its origins in global asset scarcity, which led to large capital flows toward the United States and to the creation of asset bubbles that eventually burst. In its first phase the crash exacerbated the shortage of assets in the world economy, which triggered ...
Making sense of the subprime crisis.
Sep 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT Should market participants have anticipated the large increase in home foreclosures in 2007 and 2008? Most of these foreclosures stemmed from mortgage loans originated in 2005 and 2006, raising suspicions that lenders originated many extremely risky loans during this period. We ...
The central role of home prices in the current financial crisis: how will the market clear?
Sep 22, 2008; ... This paper begins by describing some patterns in home price movements over recent decades. It then discusses some distinguishing characteristics of housing markets that will contribute to determining prices going forward: Housing is heterogeneous, making prices hard to measure. Home prices ...
Beyond leveraged losses: the balance sheet effects of the home price downturn.
Sep 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT This paper quantifies the impact of declining home prices, increasing mortgage credit losses, and the associated reduction in credit supply on real GDP growth. Using a state-level panel analysis, I first estimate the link between home prices and foreclosures. I estimate that an ...
Financial regulation in a system context.
Sep 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT The global financial crisis raises questions about the proper objectives of financial regulation and how best to meet them. Traditionally, capital requirements have been the cornerstone of bank regulation. However, the run on the investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008 led to ...
The unofficial economy and economic development.
Sep 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT In developing countries, informal firms account for up to about half of all economic activity. Using data from World Bank firm-level surveys, we find that informal firms are small and extremely unproductive compared with even the small formal firms in the sample, and especially ...
The real exchange rate and economic growth.
Sep 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT I show that undervaluation of the currency (a high real exchange rate) stimulates economic growth. This is true particularly for developing countries. This finding is robust to using different measures of the real exchange rate and different estimation techniques. I also provide ...