After the Panic: Are Financial Crises Demand or Supply Shocks? Evidence from International Trade

Abstract

Are financial crises a negative shock to aggregate demand or supply? This is a fundamental question for research and policy making. Arguments for stimulus usually presume demand-side shortfalls; arguments for tax cuts or structural reform look to the supply side. Resolving the question requires models with both mechanisms, and empirical tests to tell them apart. We develop a small open economy model, where a country is subject to deleveraging shocks that impose binding credit constraints on households and/or firms. These financial crisis events leave distinct statistical signatures in the time series record that divide sharply between each type of shock. Empirical analysis reveals a clear picture: after financial crises the dominant pattern is that imports contract, exports hold steady or even rise, and the real exchange rate depreciates. History shows financial crises are predominantly a negative shock to demand. (JEL F14, F31, F41, G01, N10, N20, N70)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.