International Financial Crises in Long-Term Historical Perspective

这一建议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追溯到八个世纪以来的情况。除其他外，它还包括关于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、冲突和贸易的数据。虽然数据集建立在许多以前学者的研究基础上，但它在许多方面都更为广泛，包括亚洲（包括殖民地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县的国内债务历史数据，涵盖世界大部分地区，可以追溯到世纪初。此前，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并不重要，直到最近一段时间。作者打算使整个数据集和文档易于在线获得。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力，而不是货币构成和债务期限结构等因素。假设是，事实上，后一种现象更多地是易受债务危机影响的表现，而不是直接的驱动因素（如Diamond和Rajan所述，2001年）。第二个项目研究从连续违约中“毕业”的现象。为什么对大多数国家来说，这似乎需要世纪以上的时间？区分成功毕业生和惯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。该建议的一个核心方面是维护、更新和改进其他研究人员广泛使用的金融危机和汇率数据集。这些数据集不仅涉及数据的收集和分类，还涉及培训学生实施（和改进）各种各样的分类和分类算法（例如，衡量汇率灵活性和制定衡量一个国家是否已经（从连续违约）毕业的指标。如何应对国际金融危机的问题仍然是近期国际宏观经济政策面临的主要挑战之一。现有的大部分工作是基于相对较短或较窄的数据集，掩盖了重要的长期历史模式。学术界、中央银行和国际贷款机构的决策者以及私营金融市场从业者都应该对这一项目的结果感兴趣。

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.