We examine how regularly scheduled macroeconomic announcements for the U.S., Germany and the euro area affect the German stock market, using high–frequency, minute–by–minute DAX data. Our study extends the literature on high–frequency announcement effects in several ways. First, we...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan’s Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

We examine whether the Chinese exchange rate is misaligned and how Chinese trade flows respond to the exchange rate and to economic activity. We find, first, that the Chinese currency, the renminbi (RMB), is substantially below the value predicted by estimates based upon a cross-country sample,...

Motivated by the observed international reserve hoarding behavior in the post-1997 crisis period, we explore the Mrs Machlup’s wardrobe hypothesis and the related keeping up with the Joneses argument. It is conceived that, in addition to psychological reasons, holding a relatively high level...

A canonical two country-two good model with standard preferences does not address three classic international macroeconomic puzzles as well as two well-known asset pricing puzzles. Specifically, under financial autarky, it does not account for the high real exchange rate (RER) volatility...

This paper puts the original Reinhart-Rogoff dataset, made public by Herndon et al. (2013), to a formal econometric test to pin down debt threshold endogenously. We show that the nonlinear relation from debt to growth is not very robust. Taken with a pinch of salt, our results suggest, however,...

This paper puts the Reinhart-Rogoff dataset to a formal econometric testing to see whether public debt has a negative nonlinear effect on growth if public debt exceeds 90% of GDP. Using nonlinear threshold models, we show that the negative nonlinear relationship between debt and growth is very...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is in the process of re-inventing itself with bilateral and multilateral surveillance emerging as a key function. The paper analyses how IMF surveillance announcements may be influenced by political power that member countries exert at the IMF. First, we...

We explore empirically how capital inflows into the US and financial deregulation within the United States interacted in driving the run-up (and subsequent decline) in US housing prices over the period 1990-2012. To obtain an ex ante measure of financial liberalization, we focus on the history...