What Happened: Financial Factors in the Great Recession

From a new NBER working paper by Mark Gertler and Simon Gilchrist

Abstract:

Since the onset of the Great Recession, an explosion of both theoretical and empirical research has investigated how the financial crisis emerged and how it was transmitted to the real sector. The goal of this paper is to describe what we have learned from this new research and how it can be used to understand what happened during the Great Recession. In the process, we also present some new evidence on the role of the household balance sheet channel versus the disruption of banking. We examine a panel of quarterly state level data on house prices, mortgage debt and employment along with a measure of banking distress. Then exploiting both panel data and time series methods, we analyze the contribution of the house price decline versus the banking distress indicator to the overall decline in employment during the Great Recession. We confirm a common finding in the literature that the household balance sheet channel is important for regional variation in employment. However, we also find that the disruption in banking was central to the overall employment contraction.

Gated copy of the paper is here.  

"Financial markets benefit society"

From a new European Central Bank paper by Alexander Popov,  "Evidence on finance and economic growth."

This paper reviews and appraises the body of empirical research on the association between financial markets and economic growth that has accumulated over the past quarter-century. The bulk of the historical evidence suggests that financial development affects economic growth in a positive, monotonic way, yet recent research endeavors have provided useful and important benefits of this conventional wisdom. Moreover, the proliferation of micro-level datasets has enabled researchers to study more precise links between theory and measurement. The paper highlights the mechanisms through which financial markets benefit society, as well as the channels through which finance can slow down long-term growth.

Available here. 

Long Run Growth of Financial Technology

From the abstract:

In most sectors, technological progress boosts efficiency. But financial technology and the associated data-intensive trading strategies have been blamed for market inefficiency. A key cause for concern is that better technology might induce traders to extract other's information from order flow data mining, rather than produce information themselves.

Defenders of these new trading strategies argue that they provide liquidity by identifying uninformed orders and taking the other side of their trades. We adopt the lens of long-run growth to understand how improvements in financial technology shape information choices, trading strategies and market efficiency, as measured by price informativeness and market liquidity. We find that unbiased technological change can explain a market-wide shift in data collection and trading strategies. But our findings also cast doubt on common wisdom. First, although extracting information from order flow does crowd out production of  fundamental information, this does not compromise price informativeness. Second, although taking the opposite side of uninformed trades is  typically called "providing liquidity," the rise of such trading strategies does not necessarily improve liquidity in the market as a whole. 

Long Run Growth of Financial Technology available at NBER.