Aggregate stock prices, relative to virtually any indicator of fundamental value, soared to unprecedented levels in the 1990s. Even today, after the market declines since 2000, they remain well above historical norms. Why? We consider one particular explanation: a fall in macroeconomic risk, or...

This paper examines the co-movement among stock market prices and exchange rates within a three-country Centre-Periphery dynamic equilibrium model in which agents in the Centre country face portfolio constraints. In our model, international transmission occurs through the terms of trade, through...

While financial markets have recently become more complete and international capital flows well liberalized, markets for goods remain segmented. To investigate how more complete security markets may relieve the effects of this segmentation, we examine a series of two-country economies with...

This paper studies international equity markets when some investors have private information that is valuable for trading in many countries simultaneously. We use a dynamic model of equity trading to show that 'global' private information helps understand US investors’ trading behaviour and...

The introduction of the euro on 1 January 1999 created the conditions for an integrated government bond market in the euro area. Using a unique data set from the electronic trading platform Euro-MTS, we consider what is the ‘benchmark’ in this market. We develop and apply two definitions of...

We study the comovement among stock prices and among exchange rates in a three-good three-country Centre-Periphery dynamic equilibrium model in which the Centre’s agents face portfolio constraints. We characterize equilibrium in closed form for a broad class of portfolio constraints, solving...

International macro-finance is a new area of open economy macroeconomics that brings portfolio choice and asset pricing considerations into models of international macroeconomics. The importance of these considerations--typically relegated to Finance and largely overlooked in traditional...

We examine trade credit links between firms as a channel of international return comovement. We model firms in different countries connected by trade credit links in segmented stock markets with asymmetrically informed investors. The model predicts that the cross-serial correlation of country...

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...

While the current account of euro area as a whole has remained almost balanced in the past two decades, several member countries have sizeable deficits or surpluses. In this paper, we interpret these imbalances as indicators of net capital flows among the euro-area countries and show that these...