This paper studies the nature of spillover effects in bank lending flows from advanced to the emerging market economies and identifies specific channels through which such effects occur. Based on a gravity model we examine a panel data set on cross-border bank flows from 17 advanced to 28...

Political risk represents an important hidden transaction cost that reduces international trade. This paper investigates the claim that German public export credit guarantees (Hermes guarantees) mitigate this friction to trade flows and hence promote exports. We employ an empirical trade gravity...

Globalization has effected business cycle developments in OECD countries and has increased activities of firms across national borders. This paper analyzes whether these two developments are linked. We use a new firm-level dataset on the foreign activities of German firms to test whether foreign...

This paper analyzes the evolution of the degree of global cyclical interdependence over the period 1960-2005. We categorize the 106 countries in our sample into three groups: industrial countries, emerging markets, and other developing economies. Using a dynamic factor model, we then decompose...

This study investigates the determinants of adjustments in the provision of cross-border loans by internationally active banks. For the period from 2002 to 2010, we look at quarterly transaction data (excluding valuation effects) on long-term loans issued by the largest 69 German banking groups...

We use oil price forecasts from the Consensus Economic Forecast poll to analyze how forecasters form their expectations. Our findings seem to indicate that the extrapolative as well as the regressive expectation formation hypothesis play a role. Standard measures of forecast accuracy reveal...