The rapid growth in China’s domestic investment in recent decades has generated a large appetite for global goods, including from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper estimates the impact of changes in China’s investment growth on SSA’s exports. Although rising trading links...

This paper examines the benefits from hedging the currency exposure of international investments in single- and multi-country equity and bond portfolios from the perspectives of German, Japanese, British and American investors. Over the period 1975 to 2009, hedging of currency risk substantially...

The paper examines the determinants of employment growth, drawing on data available across a sample of Caribbean countries. To that end, the paper analyzes estimates of the employment-output elasticity and the response of employment growth to major sources of labor market determinants, in the...

For a sample of 83 financial institutions during 2003–2011, this paper attempts to answer three questions: first, what is the evolution of banks’ stock price exposure to country-level and global risk factors as approximated by equity indices; second, which bank-specific characteristics...

This paper assesses productivity trends in Canada vis-a-vis the United States from two perspectives. The first one is based on estimates of total factor productivity. The second one decomposes productivity growth into two sources: investment-specific technical change, associated with...

This study uses bivariate extremal dependence measures, based on the number of equity return co-exceedances in two markets, to quantify both negative and positive equity returns contagion in mature and emerging equity markets during the past decade. The results indicate (a) higher contagion for...

Systemic risk remains a major concern to policymakers since widespread defaults in the corporate and financial sectors could pose substantial costs to society. Forward-looking measures and/or indicators of systemic default risk are thus needed to identify potential buildups of vulnerability in...

Do the dynamics of net flows to U.S. retail mutual funds affect equity returns in emerging markets? The question merits further examination since retail investors in mutual funds can exert a much greater degree of "control" over these funds via cash injections or redemptions at any time. A VAR...

The paper analyzes the effects of monetary policy in a dynamic model of a small open economy with cash and credit goods production, where government consumption is financed by seignorage. It shows that the interrelationships between the growth rate of the monetary aggregate and the technological...

This paper describes a corporate sector vulnerability indicator, the expected number of defaults (END), based on the joint occurrence of defaults among a number of firms and/or institutions. The END indicator is general enough to assess systemic risk in the corporate and financial sectors, as...