International Financial Crises in Long-Term Historical Perspective

该提案涉及应用和进一步发展最近汇编的历史数据集，用于研究国际金融危机。该数据集涵盖了66个国家自独立以来或可追溯到8个世纪以前的历史。它包括政府国内外债务和违约、通货膨胀、银行危机、汇率、贸易、政府支出和收入、冲突和贸易等方面的数据。虽然该数据集建立在许多先前学者的研究基础之上，但它在许多方面都要广泛得多，例如，包括亚洲（包括殖民时期的印度和共产主义前的中国）以及非洲和整个欧洲的数据。一个新颖的特点是跨国家的国内债务历史数据，涵盖了世界上大部分国家，可追溯到20世纪初。在此之前，国内债务数据一直被认为相对较小，对大多数新兴市场国家来说不重要，直到最近才有所改变。作者打算使整个数据集和文档易于在线获取。该项目有三个目标。首先，作者希望探讨高债务水平在多大程度上是违约、通货膨胀和金融危机的主要基本驱动因素，而不是货币构成和债务期限结构等因素。假设是，事实上，后一种现象更多的是对债务危机的脆弱性的表现，而不是直接驱动因素（如Diamond和Rajan， 2001年推测的那样）。第二个项目着眼于连续违约的“毕业”现象。为什么大多数国家似乎花了一个多世纪的时间？区分成功的毕业生和累犯的关键因素是什么？最后一个项目探讨汇率制度和连续违约，也建立在汇率分类的相关工作基础上。该建议的一个核心方面是维护、更新和改进有关金融危机和汇率的数据集，这些数据集已被其他研究人员广泛使用。这些数据集不仅涉及收集和整理数据，还涉及培训学生实施（和改进）各种各样的整理和分类算法（例如，衡量汇率灵活性和制定衡量一个国家是否已经毕业的指标）。更广泛的影响如何应对国际金融危机仍然是近期国际宏观经济政策面临的主要挑战之一。现有工作的大部分是基于相对较短或较窄的数据集，模糊了重要的长期历史模式。学术界、央行和国际贷款机构的政策制定者以及私人金融市场从业者应该对这个项目的结果非常感兴趣。

This proposal involves applications and further development of a recentlycompiled historical data set for the study of international financial crises. The data set covers 66 countries since their time of independence or dating back as far as eight centuries. It includes, among many other things, data on government domestic and foreign debt and defaults, inflation, banking crises, exchange rates, trade, government expenditures and revenues, conflict and trade. While the data set builds on the research of many previous scholars, it is considerably more extensive in many dimensions, encompassing for example, data on Asia including colonial India and pre-communist China, as well as Africa and all of Europe. One novel feature is cross county historical data on domestic debt covering most of the world going back to the early twentieth century. Previously, domestic debt data had been thought relatively small andunimportant for most emerging market countries until the very recent period. The authors intend to make the entire data set and documentation easily available online.The project has three goals. First, the authors wish to explore the extent to which high debt levels are the main fundamental driver of defaults, inflation, and financial crises, as opposed to factors such as the currency composition and maturity structure of debt. The hypothesis is that, in fact, the latter phenomenon are more a manifestation of vulnerability to debt crises rather than proximate drivers (as conjectured by Diamond and Rajan, 2001). The second project looks at the phenomenon of "graduation" from serial default. Why does it seem to take more than a century for most countries, and what are key factors that separate successful graduates from recidivists. The final project explores exchange rate regimes and serial default, building also on related work on exchange rate classification. A central aspect of the proposal is the maintenance, updating and improvement of data sets on financial crises and exchange rates, which are widely used by other researchers. These data sets involve not only collecting and sorting data, but training students to implement (and improve) a wide variety of sorting and classification algorithms (for example, on measuring exchange rate flexibility and developing metrics to gauge whether a country has graduated (from serial default.)Broader ImpactThe question of how to deal with international financial crises remains one of the central international macroeconomic policy challenges of recent time. The bulk of existing work is based on relatively short or narrow data sets, obscuring important longer term historical patterns. The results of this project should be of great interest to academics, policymakers at central banks and international lending institutions, as well as to privatefinancial market practitioners.