Financial Crises: Explanations, Types, and Implications; by Stijn Claessens and M. Ayhan Kose; imf working Paper 13/28; January 1, 2013

What are the major needs for additional data and methods? 

 

As the review here documents, it is necessary to put together new data series and to design 

new methodologies to get a better understanding of crises episodes. The review lists several 

recent studies that put together new data series on financial crises. In spite of these, there is 

clearly a case for more research to collect additional cross-country data on aspects relevant to 

financial crises. Better data on domestic debt and house prices are urgently needed to get a 

richer understanding of domestic debt dynamics and fluctuations in housing markets. There 

is also a need for better (international) data for both surveillance and early warning exercises 

(see Heath, 2013 and Cerutti, Claessens and McGuire, 2013, for data needs). For a deeper 

understanding of crises and the policy issues surrounding these episodes, another need is to 

design new methods to classify crises in a more robust manner. Moreover, it would be 

important to examine periods of financial disruptions, which are not necessarily crises. 

Although good luck or adequate policy measures may have prevented a financial crisis 

following such disruption episodes, there are lessons to be learned since those are the types 

of periods that can provide case studies of counterfactuals to analyze the macroeconomic 

outcomes and implications of policy responses.  

 

 

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