This study explores the changing direction and degree of financial integration of the emerging economies, People’s Republic of China (PRC) and India, with ASEAN-5 and compares it to the developed economies, the US and Japan, in a time-varying framework. The concordance and rolling...

We study the effect of financial integration on the transmission of international business cycles. In a sample of 20 developed countries between 1978 and 2009 we find that, in periods without financial crises, increases in bilateral financial linkages are associated with more divergent output...

No single measure of real or financial integration sufficiently captures all of the salient characteristics of the extent of integration between individual economies and of economies within particular regional groups. This paper introduces the idea of utilising and combining the effects of a...

Standard theory predicts that financial integration leads to a lower degree of business cycle synchronization. Surprisingly, cross-country studies find the opposite. Our contribution is to document the theoretically predicted negative effect of financial integration on business cycle...

We find that risk sharing in the European Union (EU) has been increasing over the past decade due to increased cross-ownership of assets across countries. Industrial specialization has also been increasing over the last decade and we conjecture that risk sharing plays an important causal effect...

We review the large literature on various economic policies that could help developing economies effectively manage the process of financial globalization. Our central findings indicate that policies promoting financial sector development, institutional quality, and trade openness appear to help...

This Paper contributes ideas and analysis to the ongoing EU reform debate. It consists of three distinct parts: voting in the Council of Ministers, restructuring the ECB's Governing Council, and the setting of enlargement “examination” dates. The IGC currently focuses on Council voting,...

This Paper presents a stylized model of international trade and asset price bubbles. Its central insight is that bubbles tend to appear and expand in countries where productivity is low relative to the rest of the world. These bubbles absorb local savings, eliminating inefficient investments and...

The debate on EMU has been very influenced by the traditional theory of optimum currency areas (OCAs). The paper shows that this theory is not an ideal yardstick for an assessment of EMU. Its assumptions are not very realistic and its focus on asymmetric real shocks is much too narrow. In...