About the project

Thank you for visiting the New Bagehot Crisis Response Project (the New Bagehot Project) Prototype 1.0. The New Bagehot Project is an initiative of the Yale Program on Financial Stability (YPFS) at the Yale School of Management and is made possible through the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Jeff Bezos, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bill Gates, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and an anonymous donor.

The New Bagehot Project is an online platform for disseminating our knowledge on how to fight financial crises. The platform will be based on the extensive study of specific interventions undertaken by policymakers to combat past crises. The objective of the platform will be to equip policymakers with insights and lessons learned from these crises so that they are better prepared to respond in the future. We anticipate publicly launching a full version of the platform by the end of 2021.

This New Bagehot Crisis Response Project Prototype 1.0 is intended to demonstrate our concept for the platform using a preliminary set of our material in working draft form (described below). We are sharing the Prototype in hopes of securing feedback on both (a) the design, functionality, etc. of the platform itself and (b) the preliminary material that it contains. The participation of our community of potential users will be essential to the ultimate success of the New Bagehot Project.

How We Developed This Material

We developed the working draft cases and the resulting survey and matrix using publicly available documents written in English or other languages that can be translated by our team. Often, this meant that we did not have access to the primary documents establishing a given program and/or reporting on its usage. In these situations, we had to rely on secondary sources summarizing the programs (including documents such as European Commission state aid decisions). This might well have provided us less detail about a program than was available for other programs for which we were able to access primary documents. In describing whether or not a given program had a particular design feature (e.g., foreign subsidiaries being eligible to participate) in the absence of specific detail, we have had to develop assumptions to use (e.g., “foreign subsidiaries eligible unless specifically excluded” versus “foreign subsidiaries ineligible unless specifically included”). We have noted where such assumptions are made in the survey.

Identifying additional sources of information and data is one of the primary purposes of sharing the documents in working draft form. While we have indicated below several specific areas where we know further detail is needed, we welcome input on any point. The Prototype contains an annotation feature that enables invited users to make comments directly on the working drafts. You can also contact us directly with feedback by emailing New Bagehot Director Christian McNamara at christian.mcnamara@yale.edu.

Our working draft material will not become final until we have solicited feedback from representatives of the jurisdictions whose programs are being evaluated. Even after final material is published on the fully launched New Bagehot Platform, the annotation feature will enable invited users to make comments on documents that will be visible only to other invited users and not the general public (who will be able to see only the documents themselves). In this way, the New Bagehot platform will house living documents that reflect the latest thinking of the community of invited users.

Specific Feedback Requested on Preliminary Material

As noted, we welcome feedback on any aspect of our credit guarantee preliminary material (and on the platform itself). However, the items below are topics that we have specifically identified for further study based on the information and data currently available to us:

  1. Detailed issuance data (by maturity, type of debt, type of institution, etc.)

  2. Additional detail on how credit guarantees interacted with other interventions (e.g., whether policymakers saw other inventions as important to the success of credit guarantees or vice versa)

  3. Additional detail on the conditions for participation (e.g., where a program has “compensation restrictions” what those restrictions actually were)

Feedback can be provided via the Prototype’s annotation tool or by contacting New Bagehot Director Christian McNamara at christian.mcnamara@yale.edu.