This paper explores the geography of portfolio flows emanating from institutional investors located in mature markets. We identify precise global and regional dynamics in equity and bond flows. Very few countries happen to receive (or lose) funding in isolation. We also find strong evidence of...

Financial institutions are increasingly linked internationally and engaged in cross-border operations. As a result, financial crises and potential bail-outs by governments have important international implications. Extending Allen and Gale (2000) we provide a model of international contagion...

According to the ’macroeconomic trilemma’ the ability of small economies to pursue an independent monetary policy is jointly determined by country specific foreign exchange (FX) rate flexibility and capital mobility. In particular, free floating economies should be able to isolate domestic...

We estimate Shiller portfolio weights for OECD countries and US states. We find that the income of US federal states is derived to about 50 percent from own output, that of OECD countries to about 60 percent.This suggests that US states display considerable ’home bias at home’ and that the...

The ongoing financial turmoil has triggered a lively debate on ways of containing systemic risk and lessening the likelihood of future boom-and-bust episodes in credit markets. Particularly, it has been argued that banking regulation might attenuate procyclicality in lending standards by...

Wealthier people generally hold a larger part of their savings in risky assets. Using the US Survey of Consumer Finances, I show that wealthier households also have a higher portfolio share of foreign assets. This relative home bias of the poor does not seem to be explained by fixed...

Recent economic developments have shown the importance of spillover and contagion effects in financial markets. Such effects are not limited to relations between the levels of financial variables but also impact on their volatility. I investigate Granger causality in conditional mean and...

Spillover and contagion effects have gained significant interest in the recent years of financial crisis. Attention has not only been directed to relations between returns of financial variables, but to spillovers in risk as well. I use the family of Constant Conditional Correlation GARCH models...

Multivariate simultaneous equations models were used extensively for macroeconometric analysis when Sims (1980) advocated vector autoregressive (VAR) models as alternatives. At that time longer and more frequently observed macroeconomic time series called for models which described the dynamic...

Recent economic developments have shown the importance of spillover and contagion effects in financial markets as well as in macroeconomic reality. Such effects are not limited to relations between the levels of variables but also impact on the volatility and the distributions. We propose a...