The Great Recession has focused renewed attention on the role of household leverage in the business cycle. Household debt overhang and the ensuing process of deleveraging are often cited as factors holding back economic recovery. This paper studies the relationship between household debt and economic performance during the Great Depression in the U.S. on the […]

with Fabio Braggion and Lyndon Moore. We study the effects of bank mergers and acquisitions in the U.K from 1885 to 1925. The lack of a regulatory authority and the confidential nature of merger negotiations allows us to precisely measure the wealth effects of M&As in a laissez-faire environment. We find positive wealth effects for […]

in: Hubert Bonin, Niels-Viggo Haueter, Alfredo Gigliobianco, and Harold James (ed.) Public Policies and the Direction of Financial Flows, Bucharest 2012 This paper tracks the history of government intervention in the U.S. mortgage market between 1932 and the 1960s, a period in which the system for housing finance underwent a fundamental transformation. Whereas prior to […]

European Economic Review, Vol. 19, Issue 6, pp. 881-897. The costs of wars have been the main driver of public debt in the Western World during the modern era. The late twentieth century stands out as a period that saw a pronounced increase of government debt to GDP ratios in peacetime. This paper assesses the […]

with Alan Taylor and Oscar Jorda — American Economic Review, Vol. 102, Issue 2, pp. 1029-61. 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 […]