GIVE NOW about ocw help & faqs contact us
14.454 | Spring 2026 | Graduate

# Economic Crises

### Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 2 sessions/week, 75 minutes/session

Recitations: 1 session/week, 75 minutes/session

### Course Description

This half-semester, 13-week course provides a fast-paced description of the canonical macroeconomic models of ﬁnancial frictions and crises. We will cover various topics, including (i) ﬁnancial ampliﬁcation mechanisms; (ii) ﬁnancial intermediation and credit crunches; (iii) coordination failures and bank runs; (iv) speculative bubbles and credit booms; (v) liquidity traps and deleveraging; and (vi) sudden stops and ﬁnancial contagion.

### Prerequisites

MIT students need to have taken 14.453 Economic Fluctuations.

### Course Requirements

- One long problem set with weekly deadlines on individual problems (70% of the grade)
- Final exam (30% of the grade)

You can waive the final exam if you have met all the problem set deadlines and have an average score above 90%. (In 2026, the final exam was waived.)

## Course Info

### Instructor

- Prof. Ricardo Caballero

### Departments

- Economics

### As Taught In

Spring 2026

### Level

Graduate

### Topics

- Social Science
  - Economics
    - Financial Economics
    - Macroeconomics

### Learning Resource Types

notes Lecture Notes
assignment_turned_in Problem Set Solutions
assignment Problem Sets
auto_stories Readings

Browse Resources

# You are leaving MIT OpenCourseWare

Please be advised that external sites may have terms and conditions, including license rights, that differ from ours. MIT OCW is not responsible for any content on third party sites, nor does a link suggest an endorsement of those sites and/or their content.