Banks guarantee international trade through letters of credit. This paper analyzes what happens to trade when the critical role of banks as trade guarantors is compromised. Using the case of the Greek capital controls in 2015, the events around which led to a massive loss of confidence in the...

We present evidence that the predictive ability of the yield spread for short-run inflation is related to its predictive ability for economic activity. In particular, an increase in the slope of the term structure predicts an increase in output growth and a decrease in inflation of equal...

The advent of the single currency within the European Union provides a natural experiment to measure how the cost of equity changes as globalization takes place. This is because the launch of the single currency has led to the elimination of currency-related restrictions on the composition of...

The paper examines whether or not the convergence of European economies towards Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the launch of the single currency leads to an increase in stock market integration through a reduction in investment barriers. We estimate a conditional asset pricing model,...

This paper employs a new methodology for measuring the contribution of growth and interest rate differentials to the half-life of deviations from Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). Our method is based on directly comparing the impulse response function of a VAR model, where the real exchange rate is...

This paper shows that during the 1990s the process of gradual economic and monetary integration, which eventually led to EMU, also resulted in a reduction in the equity cost of capital. A similar reduction was not present in the three EU countries which chose not to enter the Eurozone. There was...

Banks guarantee international trade through letters of credit. This paper analyzes what happens to trade when the critical role of banks as trade guarantors is compromised. Using the case of the Greek capital controls in 2015, the events around which led to a massive loss of confidence in the...