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Textual analysis of 14,270 NBER Working Papers published during 1999–2016 is done to assess the effects of the 2008 crisis on the economics literature. The volume of crisis-related WPs is counter-cyclical, lagging the financial-instability-index. WPs by the Monetary-Economics, Asset-Pricing, and Corporate-Finance program members, hardly refer to “crisis/crises” in the pre-crisis period. As the crisis develops, however, their study-efforts of crisis-related issues increase rapidly. In contrast, WPs in macroeconomics-related programs refer quite extensively in the pre-crisis period to “crisis/crises” and to crises-related topics. Overall, our findings are consistent with the claim that economists were not engaged sufficiently in crises studies before the 2008 crisis. However, counter to the popular image, as soon as the crisis began to unravel, the NBER affiliated economists responded dramatically by switching their focus and efforts to studying and understanding the crisis, its causes and its consequences. Thus, although economists were slow to see the crisis coming, they were fast to act. Preliminary observations on current developments suggest that the economists’ initial response to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis is consistent with these conclusions.

This article investigates the European repo market and its role as an amplification channel for sovereign-debt crises. We focus on transactions cleared via central clearing counterparties (CCPs), which account for the bulk of the repo market in the Eurozone. In particular, we collect novel data on repo haircuts applied on sovereign bonds and assess the methodologies used by CCPs for margining. We find that haircuts on peripheral sovereign bonds substantially increased in response to the rise in sovereign risk. Moreover, we document that the volume of the European repo market is strongly concentrated between few large financial institutions and few clearing houses. The procyclicality of haircuts and the concentration of secured transactions raise concerns about the CCP-intermediated repo market as asource of systemic risk in the Eurozone. This is however mitigated by the countercyclical monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB).