Essays On Financial Fragility

A number of financial crises started as an idiosyncratic shock to local banks, local securities or local markets, but the impacts eventually spread to markets with no direct economic linkage to the initial shock (e.g., the Mexican crisis in 1982 and 1994, the East Asian crisis in 1997, the Russian crisis in 1998, and the Brazilian crisis in 1999). Similarly, the financial turmoil that started in the summer of 2007 and intensified in 2008 as a local problem to the US-mortgage market has become a global concern for financial stability. These concerns are shared equally among policy makers in developed as well as in emerging market economies.