We study what makes government bonds a safe asset. Building on a sample of monthly changes in government bond yields in 40 advanced and emerging countries, we analyse the sensitivity of yields to country specific fundamentals interacted with changes in global risk (VIX). We find that inertia...

We add to the literature on the influence of the global financial cycle (GFC) and gyrations in capital flows. First, we build a new measure of the GFC based on a structural factor approach, which incorporates theoretical priors in its definition. This measure can also be decomposed in a...

We present a two-country model with an enhanced banking sector featuring risky lending and cross-border interbank market frictions. We find that (i) the strength of the financial accelerator, when applied to banks operating under uncertainty in an interbank market, will critically depend on the...

This paper examines two competing approaches for calculating current account benchmarks, i.e. the external sustainability approach á la Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (LM) versus the structural current accounts literature (SCA) based on panel econometric techniques. The aim is to gauge the medium...

This paper analyses the incidence and severity of sudden stops in euro area countries before and after the introduction of the ECB's asset purchase programmes. We define sudden stops as abrupt declines in private net financial inflows, i.e. total flows adjusted for EU and IMF loans and changes...

We analyse the interaction between monetary and macroprudential policies in the euro area by means of a two-country DSGE model with financial frictions and cross-border spillover effects. We calibrate the model for the four largest euro area countries (i.e. Germany, France, Italy, and Spain),...

In this paper, we study the effects of structural shocks that influence global risk - the main factor behind a "global capital flows cycle" - and how risk, in turn, is transmitted to capital flows. Our results show that not all the risk shocks driving the global financial cycle have the same...

A growing number of papers have studied positive and normative implications of financial frictions in DSGE models. We contribute to this literature by studying the welfare-based monetary policy in a two-country model characterized by financial frictions, alongside a number of key features, like...

The paper shows that monetary policy shocks exert a substantial effect on the size and composition of capital flows and the trade balance for the United States, with a 100 basis point easing raising net capital inflows and lowering the trade balance by 1% of GDP, and explaining about 20-25% of...

We use cross-country microdata to analyse the risk taking of households in Europe and the US. Concerning the extensive as well as the intensive margin of risky assets, European households differ substantially from US households; but also inside Europe we document substantial differences....