Economic Crises

This half-semester, 13-week course provides a fast-paced description of the canonical macroeconomic models of financial frictions and crises. We will cover various topics, including (i) financial amplification mechanisms; (ii) financial intermediation and credit crunches; (iii) coordination failures and bank runs; (iv) speculative bubbles and credit booms; (v) liquidity traps and deleveraging; and (vi) sudden stops and financial contagion.

The syllabus, on MIT OpenCourseWare

The full course — syllabus, assigned readings, problem sets, exams, and lecture notes — lives on OCW. These open the real thing: