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Program on Financial Stability Receives $7.5 million 

July 19, 2022

The funding will enable YPFS to complete the New Bagehot Project, an ambitious and comprehensive effort to draw practical lessons from past financial crises.

The Yale School of Management has raised $7.5 million to support the work of the Yale Program on Financial Stability (YPFS), the leading academic center focused on improving understanding and management of systemic risk. The funding will enable YPFS to complete the New Bagehot Project, an ambitious and comprehensive effort to draw practical lessons from past financial crises. YPFS will also continue its related work to support the world’s financial authorities in refining crisis-management tools and intervention strategies. YPFS is being supported by a group of esteemed business leaders and prominent philanthropies and firms, including Bloomberg Philanthropies, Dalio Philanthropies, Gates Ventures, Sheryl & Chip Kaye, and an anonymous donor. 

“The work of the Program on Financial Stability at Yale SOM truly represents the school’s distinctive mission to educate leaders for business and society. I am grateful for this generosity that will ensure that global financial systems and individual central banks have the tools to effectively and efficiently respond to the next financial crisis, which has a direct and far-reaching benefit on society,” said Kerwin Charles, the Indra K. Nooyi Dean and Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Economics, Policy, and Management at Yale SOM. 

Launched in 2013 with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the scope of YPFS now encompasses three interlocking components: 

  • New Bagehot Project—an online, expert-curated platform of cases studies covering the full range of policy interventions in past financial crises to improve knowledge of successful and unsuccessful interventions.
  • YPFS Institute—an annual “war college”–like forum for high-level policymakers from around the world to share experience in the design of strategy in financial crises.
  • Master’s Degree in Systemic Risk—the first-of-its-kind degree program from the Yale School of Management for early- and mid-career professionals with public-sector roles in financial stability. Courses are taught primarily by affiliates of the YPFS. 
  • The YPFS Advisory Board provides strategic guidance to the Dean of SOM and the leadership of the center as YPFS executes on its mission to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge about financial crises. YPFS Advisory Board chair Timothy F. Geithner said, “YPFS provides a unique and valuable resource, focused on the practical, grounded in knowledge of how markets work and rigorous study of the history of policy choices, to help inform more effective strategies in financial crisis management.” 

This important round of funding coincides with the completion of Phase I of the New Bagehot Project and will enable YPFS to complete Phase II. The building blocks of the Project are case studies of specific interventions to fight past crises, interviews with and lessons learned from crisis actors, and surveys of these outputs with recommendations about key decisions for various categories of interventions. As unveiled by YPFS during an event on July 19, 2022, the recently completed Phase I of the Project involved the development of a novel online platform for disseminating New Bagehot materials and the creation of a preliminary set of 7 surveys and 210 case studies to populate the platform. With the completion of an additional 18 surveys and 500 case studies by mid-2025 as part of Phase II, YPFS will have produced a body of materials representing all of the major categories of interventions policymakers are likely to consider in the face of a future crisis. The New Bagehot Project platform can be accessed at newbagehot.yale.edu. 

“Understanding how the market and economic machines work has been my passion for many years. They’re especially important for policymakers to understand because their policies affect hundreds of millions of people. Because I really like what Professor Metrick is doing to contribute to that understanding, it’s a great pleasure for me to support this program,” said Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates and Dalio Philanthropies.

Andrew Metrick, program director of the Yale Program on Financial Stability and the Janet L. Yellen Professor of Finance and Management at Yale SOM, commented, “We are fostering greater attention to crisis management from economics and other disciplines, ultimately providing policymakers with more evidence-based crisis-fighting resources. These materials are helping them better respond in real time to financial crises.”

For more information on how the Program on Financial Stability improves society’s understanding and management of systemic risk, please visit the Program’s website: https://som.yale.edu/ypfs.