Princeton University Press
Macroeconomics and Financial Crises: Bound Together by Information Dynamics
Key Metrics
- Gary B Gorton
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691227016
- -
- -
- Business & Economics > Economics - Macroeconomics
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
How financial crises are inherent features of macroeconomic dynamics
There are no bigger disruptions in the functioning of economies than financial crises. Yet prior to the crash of 2007-2008, macroeconomics incorporated financial crises simply as bad shocks, like earthquakes, failing to consider them as an intrinsic phenomenon of the evolution of macroeconomic variables, such as credit, investment, and productivity. Macroeconomics and Financial Crises rethinks how technological change, credit booms, and endogenous information production combine to generate financial crises as inherent and recurrent reactions to macroeconomic dynamics.
Gary Gorton and Guillermo Ordoñez identify short-term debt, collateral, and information as common elements that are present in all financial crises. Short-term debt is a critical element for storing value over short periods without fear of loss, but there needs to be collateral backing the debt. Critically, the collateral should be such that no agent wants to produce information about its quality. The debt backed by such collateral is information-insensitive. Gorton and Ordoñez argue that, during a credit boom, as more and more firms get loans, the economy reaches a tipping point where information production becomes too tempting, disrupting short-term debt and cutting most firms out of the credit market.
Showing how a financial crisis is an information event triggered by the dynamics of macroeconomic variables, Macroeconomics and Financial Crises provides new perspectives on the intricate relations between macroeconomics and financial crises.
Author Bio
Gary B. Gorton is The Frederick Frank Class of 1954 Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management, which he joined in August 2008. Prior to joining Yale, he was the Robert Morris Professor of Banking and Finance at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1983 to 2008. Dr. Gorton has done research in many areas of finance and economics, including both theoretical and empirical work. He is the author of Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007 (Oxford University Press) and Misunderstanding Financial Crises (Oxford University Press).
Dr. Gorton has consulted for the U.S. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, various U.S. Federal Reserve Banks, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the Central Bank of Turkey. He was a consultant to AIG Financial Products from 1996 to 2008.
Dr. Gorton received his doctorate in economics from the University of Rochester. In the field of economics, he received master's degrees at the University of Rochester and Cleveland State University, and also received a master's degree in Chinese Studies from the University of Michigan.
Source: Yale School of Management
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