Foreign exchange reserve accumulation has risen dramatically in recent years. The introduction of the euro, greater liquidity in other major currencies, and the rising current account deficits and external debt of the United States have increased the pressure on central banks to diversify away...

This Paper studies the impact of EMU on portfolio diversification opportunities. We find a significant increase in the correlation between stock returns, whether they are computed on the basis of market or sector indices. This is true for two definitions of the pre-convergence and convergence...

The paper analyzes the effects of changes to regulatory policy and to monetary policy on cross-border bank lending since the global financial crisis. Cross-border bank lending has decreased, and the home bias in the credit portfolio of banks has risen sharply, especially among banks in the euro...

Diversification opportunities in Euroland appear to have improved significantly since the advent of the euro, thus invalidating the prospects identified in the last years of the convergence-to-EMU period. We identify low frequency movements in the time series of return dispersions suggestive of...

Any security’s expected return can be decomposed into its “carry” and its expected price appreciation, where carry is a model-free characteristic that can be observed in advance. While carry has been studied almost exclusively for currencies, we find that carry predicts returns both in the...

This paper provides a broad empirical examination of the major currencies' roles in international capital markets, with a special emphasis on the first year of the Euro. A contribution is made as to how to measure these roles, both for international financing as well as for international...

Macroeconomic models of equity returns perform poorly. The proportion of daily index returns that these models explain is essentially zero. Instead of relying on macroeconomic determinants, our model includes a concept from microstructure order flow. Order flow is the proximate determinant of...

We argue that emerging economies borrow short term due to the high risk premium charged by bondholders on long-term debt. First, we present a model where the debt maturity structure is the outcome of a risk sharing problem between the government and bondholders. By issuing long-term debt, the...

This paper reconsiders the role of foreign investors in developed country equity markets. It presents a quantitative model of trading that is built around two new assumptions about investor sophistication: (i) both the foreign and domestic populations contain investors with superior information...

This Paper develops a test of contagion in financial markets based on bivariate correlation analysis, which generalizes existing tests, and applies it to the international effects of the Hong Kong stock market crisis of October 1997. Contagion is defined as a structural break in the...