Essays in Macro-finance

Abstract

This thesis provides a comparative perspective on current macro-financial phenomena. Understanding the causes and consequences of rare macroeconomic events and secular trends is inherently difficult. Competing theories and explanations are difficult to evaluate in a macroeconomic context as the potential for experimentation is limited and truly exogenous variation is hard to come by. In addition, macro-financial disasters are rare events, occurring on average less than once in a generation. This means that the time horizons to study them have to be long. A comparative perspective is also a natural starting point for the analysis of macro-financial trends. It tells us how unusual an observation is from a historical standpoint and helps to tell different explanations for the observed patterns apart. <br /> For this purpose, the research projects included in this thesis introduce new long-run cross-country data to study some of the most pertinent questions in macro-financial research. The new data allow us to put the recent growth of listed equity markets into a long-run perspective (Chapter 1), study the joint evolution of safe and risky rates over the last 150 years (Chapter 2) and learn more about the causes and consequences of systemic banking crises and government bankruptcies (Chapter 3 and 4).