The process of European integration has gained considerable momentum during the past couple of years. This paper provides an assessment of the degree of integration of both the accession states of central and eastern Europe and of the pre-ins for monetary union with respect to Germany. Using...

In the current era of strong worldwide market couplings the global financial village became highly prone to systemic collapses, events that can rapidly sweep through out the entire village. Here we present a new methodology to assess and quantify inter-market relations. The approach is based on...

The globalization of international financial markets has renewed interest in the measurement of capital mobility. Consumption-based tests such as the Euler equation test are commonly used. These tests, however, are derived under restrictive assumptions on consumer behavior. In this paper, we ask...

Stylized facts suggest that output volatility in OECD countries has declined in recent years. However, the causes and the nature of this decline have so far been analyzed mainly for the United States. In this paper, we analyze whether structural breaks in the dynamics and the volatility of the...

International activities of commercial banks are a potential source for the transmission of shocks across countries. In Europe, bank finance plays a relatively important role, and efforts have been made at creating a level playing field for financial institutions. This paper reviews the stylized...

This paper employs an Extreme Value Theory framework to investigate the existence of contagion between European and US banks. The fact that many regulators have no detailed data sets about interbank cross-exposures raises the necessity of finding market-based indicators in order to analyze the...

In this paper we extend the standard shock spillover model of Bekaert and Harvey (1997), Baele (2003) and Ng (2000) to account for asymmetries of return and volatility spillover effects from the US equity market into Canada and Mexico. Unlike previous research, we model the conditional...

We analyze the international transmission of financial stress and its effects on economic activity. We construct country specific monthly financial stress indexes (FSI) using dynamic factor models from 1970 until 2012 for 20 countries. We show that there is a strong co-movement of the FSI during...

Economic theory predicts that the integration of financial markets lowers the volatility of consumption. In this paper, we study long-term trends in the consumption volatility of the G7 countries. Using different measures of financial openness, we find that greater financial openness has been...

This paper provides compelling evidence that equity market liberalization, the most efficient way to smooth financial market frictions such as credit constraints, can alleviate persistent cross-dynastic income inequality through increasing the accumulation of human capital. We examine the impact...