This paper explains the emergence of liquidity traps in the aftermath of large-scale financial crises, as happened in the US 1930s, Japan 1990s and recently in the US and Europe. The paper introduces a new balance sheet channel that links equity capital to the risk-free interest rate. When...

We use a quantitative equilibrium model with houses, collateralized debt and foreign borrowing to study the impact of global imbalances on the U.S. economy in the 2000s. Our results suggest that the dynamics of foreign capital flows account for between one fourth and one third of the increase in...

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the change in actual and potential market risks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) during the two-year period 2007-2008 can be analyzed with the help of-analysis. In the empirical analysis, the average of the Lyapunov exponents for the dynamic...

This paper analyzes alternative models for emerging sovereign ratings. Although a small number of economic fundamentals explain ratings reasonably well, variations in those economic fundamentals are themselves explained by a small number of world factors. On the other hand, global financial...

If rating agencies add no new information to markets, their actions are not a public policy concern. But as rating changes may be anticipated, testing whether ratings add value is not straightforward. This paper argues that ratings and spreads are both noisy signals of fundamentals and suggest...

The recent debt crises in Europe and the U.S. states feature similar sharp increases in spreads on government debt but also show important differences. In Europe, the crisis occurred at high government indebtedness levels and had spillovers to the private sector. In the United States, state...

This chapter reviews some of the academic literature that links nominal and real term structures with the macroeconomy. The main conclusion is that none of our models is consistent with basic properties of nominal yields. It is difficult to explain the average shape of the nominal yield curve,...

This paper sets out to investigate the forces behind the so-called "global capital flows paradox" and related "dollar glut" observed in the era of advancing financial globalization. The supposed paradox is that the developing world has increasingly come to pursue policies that result in current...

This paper analyzes de-facto integration in some Emerging Market Economies based on behavior of deviations from Covered Interest Parity in the last decade. An Asymmetric Self Exciting Threshold Autoregressive model is used to estimate bands of speculative inaction. The estimated bands follow the...

This paper analyzes de-facto integration in some Emerging Market Economies based on behavior of deviations from Covered Interest Parity in the last decade. An Asymmetric Self Exciting Threshold Autoregressive model is used to estimate bands of speculative inaction. The estimated bands follow the...