HKS Affiliated Authors

Additional Authors:

  • Kenneth Rogoff

Excerpt

This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises, Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff, November 2014, Paper, This paper offers a "panoramic" analysis of the history of financial crises dating from England's fourteenth-century default to the current United States sub-prime financial crisis. Our study is based on a new dataset that spans all regions. It incorporates a number of important credit episodes seldom covered in the literature, including for example, defaults and restructurings in India and China. As the first paper employing this data, our aim is to illustrate some of the broad insights that can be gleaned from such a sweeping historical database. We find that serial default is a nearly universal phenomenon as countries struggle to transform themselves from emerging markets to advanced economies. Link