survey of fund managers reveals home bias for these sophisticated investorsin an unrestricted setting. Proximity, perceived informational advantage andhigher expected returns are confirmed as accompanying factors. In addition, thehome bias of equity managers is also related to institutional,...

The paper analyses whether, and to what extent, emerging market economies (EMEs) have systemic importance for global financial markets, above and beyond their influence during crises episodes. Using a novel database of exogenous economic and political shocks for 14 EMEs, we find that EME shocks...

The paper tests whether there were events of contagion, and portfolio shift, in the sovereign bond markets of eleven emerging countries' between January 1995 and November 2001. From existing definitions, we narrow down the concept of contagion by focusing on pricing errors, after general market...

The recent wave of financial crises has fueled the debate on the effect of IFIs intervention on governments' incentives to undertake reforms. In this paper we treat this intervention more generally as a country insurance contract, and examine its implications in a stylized set-up. More...

We analyze optimal ï¬scal,monetary and exchange rate policy in a simple small open econonomy model with price setting frictions.We perform our analysis in the tradition of optimal dynamic Ramsey problems.We characterize optimal allocations and the government policies that implement the optimal...

We examine the asymptotic behavior of unit root tests against nonlinear alternativesof the exponential smooth transition type if the data is erroneously nonlinearly transformed...

While it is widely agreed that Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) holds as a long-runconcept the specific dynamic driving the process is largely build upon a priori economicbelief rather than a thorough statistical modeling procedure. The two prevailing timeseries models, i.e. the exponential smooth...

How is it possible that exchange rates move in the long run towards fundamentals, whileprofessionals form consistently irrational exchange rate expectations? We look at this puzzle from adifferent perspective by analyzing investor sentiment in the US-dollar market. First, long-horizonregressions...

This paper makes three contributions to our understanding of the price discovery process in currencymarkets. First, it provides evidence that this process cannot be the familiar one based on adverse selectionand customer spreads, since such spreads are inversely related to a trade’s likely...

This study examines profits and speculation in the USD/EUR trading of a bank in Germanyover a four-month period. Dealing activity at the bank generates profits but speculation doesnot seem to contribute to this. We find that speculative positions fail to become profitablewithin a 30-minutes'...