This paper argues that the globalization of securities markets may promote contagion among investors by weakening incentives for gathering costly country-specific information and by strengthening incentives for imitating arbitrary market portfolios. In the presence of short-selling constraints,...

We develop a new dynamic factor model that allows us to jointly characterize global macroeconomic and financial cycles and the spillovers between them. The model decomposes macroeconomic cycles into the part driven by global and country-specific macro factors and the part driven by spillovers...

We construct a new measure of the changing generosity of deposit insurance for many countries, empirically model the international influences on the adoption and generosity of deposit insurance, and show that the expansion of deposit insurance generosity increased asset risk in banking systems....