Kris James Mitchener

I will be presenting research on Connected Lending of Last Resort at the University Toronto's Conference on Banks, States and the People: Origins and Impacts of Banking Crises on May 23rd.

Lots of advanced-economy central banks are realizing losses at the moment. Is this necessarily the outcome of disinflationary policies? My article Do Disinflation Policies Ravage Central Bank Finances working paper (with Eric Monnet and  Théodore Humann) finds that in the last major rate-tightening cycle, triggered by the so-called Volcker Shock, central banks central bank actually increased profits. Our research has just been accepted for publication at Economic Policy. Don't have time for the full article? Read a policy briefing at VoxEU or in French at CEPII.

My paper Contagion of Fear has just been accepted for publication at Explorations in Economic History.

I will presenting a featured lecture entitled Globalization Wars at Harvard's Political Economy of International Finance Conference in late March.

My paper The Effects of Countercyclical Interest Rates: Evidence from the Classical Gold Standard was recently published at the Journal of International Economics in November 2023.

Watch some of my recent commentary on the U.S. Public Debt on CNBC.

In March, I presented my working paper How do Financial Crises Redistribute Risk (with Angela Vossmeyer) at a Northwestern University conference . Our paper examines the important and neglected role of mergers during financial crisis and shows that during the Great Depression risk in the system ended up higher than prior to the crisis despite 9,000 bank exits.  The 1,500 acquiring banks played an important role raising this risk. 

My new working paper Domino Secessions: Evidence from the U.S. (with Kim Oosterlink and Jean Lacroix) examines how the process of secession depends on the decisions of other regions' decisions. We build a model to explore the dynamics of secession and then evaluate how sub-sovereign debt can be used to examine the evolution of secession movements -- using data from the canonical case of the U.S. South in the 1860s.

Watch some of my recent commentary on the rate-tightening cycle on CNBC.

Ever wonder if American populism a persistent political phenomena? Using a new dataset linking county vote shares in the 1890s with recent periods, my new working paper Deep Roots: On the Persistence of American Populism with Helen Milner and Ze Han shows that populist movements in the United States indeed have deep roots. Counties where voters were enthusiastic about populist parties in the late nineteenth century had higher vote shares for Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

My article Sovereign Debt in the 21st Century (with Christoph Trebesch) surveys the research landscape on sovereign debt since the Eurozone Debt Crisis, providing a long-run perspective on the "lessons learned" and suggesting what issues will dominate this century. It has just been published in the June 2023 issue of the Journal of Economic Literature.

See my new working paper Connected Lending of Last Resort on how relationships between central bankers and banks has important consequences for lending during crises.

My recent research on pandemics and healthcare Do Pandemics Change Healthcare? Evidence from the Great Influenza  was featured at the NBER  and was recently discussed by my co-author, Melissa Thomasson on Freakonomics, M.D.

My article The Smoot Hawley Trade War (co-authored with Kirsten Wandschneider and Kevin O'Rourke), appears in the October 2022 issue of the Economic Journal.

My article Bank Regulation, Network Topology, and Systemic Risk: Evidence from the Great Depression (co-authored with Angela Vossmeyer and Sanjiv Das) appears in the August 2022 issue of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.