International risk-sharing has far-reaching implications both for economic policy and for basic research in economics. When countries do not share risk, individuals in those countries experience fluctuations in their consumption levels that are undesirable and possibly unnecessary. This paper...

The extent and direction of causation between micro volatility and business cycles are debated. We examine, empirically and theoretically, the source and effects of fluctuations in the dispersion of producer- level sales and production over the business cycle. On the theoretical side, we study...

We explore the different factors that drive expected returns in world markets. Our research offers two innovations. First, the introduction of the Euro currency unit greatly reduces the complexity of including foreign exchange risk in asset pricing models. We use a synthetic Euro excess return...

This paper documents that carry traders are subject to crash risk: i.e. exchange rate movements between high-interest-rate and low-interest-rate currencies are negatively skewed. We argue that this negative skewness is due to sudden unwinding of carry trades, which tend to occur in periods in...

Recent studies have shown that disaster risk can generate asset return moments similar to those observed in the U.S. data. However, these studies have ignored the cross-country asset pricing implications of the disaster risk model. This paper shows that standard U.S.-based disaster risk model...

Large current account deficits, and the corresponding reliance on capital flows from abroad, can increase a country's vulnerability to periods of heightened risk and uncertainty. This paper develops a framework to evaluate such vulnerabilities. It highlights the central importance of two...

We estimate channels of international risk sharing between European Monetary Union (EMU), European Union, and other OECD countries 1992-2007. We focus on risk sharing through savings, factor income flows, and capital gains. Risk sharing through factor income and capital gains was close to zero...

Common wisdom dictates that uncertainty impedes trade--we show that uncertainty can fuel more trade in a simple general equilibrium trade model with information frictions. In equilibrium, increases in uncertainty increase both the mean and the variance in returns to exporting implying that trade...

One of the main economic villains before the crisis was the presence of large "global imbalances." The concern was that the U.S. would experience a sudden stop of capital flows, which would unavoidably drag the world economy into a deep recession. However, when the crisis finally did come, the...