What determines sovereign risk? We study the London bond market from the 1870s to the 1930s. Our findings support conventional wisdom concerning the low credibility of the interwar gold standard. Before 1914 gold standard adherence effectively signalled credibility and shaved up to 30 basis...

In recent years free movement of financial capital following financial liberalization has given the impression that financial markets are truly globalized. In this paper we argue that free movement of financial capital alone does not constitute financial globalization. To achieve true financial...

Utilizing formal nonlinear unit root test (Sarno, The behavior of US public debt: a nonlinear perspective. Economics Letters 2001: 119 – 125), this study provides robust evidence of nonlinear mean reversion in the real exchange rates of 4 major ASEAN countries. We conclude that the bulk of the...

The real value of the U.S. dollar and the level of U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) have shown a strong correlation since the 1970s. Previous empirical studies on this relationship use primarily national or industry level data. This study uses firm-level data to test the hypothesis that...

In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU’s monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

The US current account deficit has been persistently large and has brought the country's ratio of foreign debt to GDP to 20%, a figure that is high by historical standards. This paper argues that while US solvency is not a near-term constraint on ongoing deficits, the sheer size of the US...

Inward FDI in developing Mediterranean countries is supposedly expected to soar as a result of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EURO-MED) between the European Union and twelve Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries that emerged from the 1995 Barcelona Conference. This is especially true...

The central claim in this paper is that by explicitly introducing costs of international trade (narrowly, transport costs but more broadly, tariffs, nontariff barriers and other trade costs), one can go far toward explaining a great number of the main empirical puzzles that international...

This paper examines the exchange rate pass-through to yen based manufactured import prices of Japan using asymmetric unit root and cointegration tests and asymmetric models. Due to sticky prices, for example, there are reasons to believe that the degree of pass-through depends on whether the...

We apply Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) theory to the analysis of long- run equilibrium in the foreign exchange market. We study the case of Portugal vis-à-vis Germany and Spain, and the case of Spain vis-à-vis Germany, in the period 1960-1990. The empirical analysis was based on unit-root...