How do financial frictions in currency markets affect firm-level exports? We bring new answer to this question by looking at a recent episode in the summer of 2011 when the cost of US dollar funding increased markedly for European banks and their clients. Our analysis relies on a unique dataset...

We ask whether uncertainty about interest rates is important for economic activity. Effects of interest rate uncertainty on the economy are examined through the lens of a small VAR where the assumption that uncertainty can affect real activity contemporaneously but not vice versa is indeed in...

China's rapid growth over the past decade has been one of the main drivers of the rise in mineral commodity demand and prices. At a time when concerns about the sustainability of China's growth model are rising, this paper assesses to what extent a hard landing in China would impact other...

This study identifies common features of currency crises in 15 emerging countries over the period 1980-1998. By analyzing such features, we build an early-warning system aimed at predicting looming crises in probabilistic terms. This work departs from the existing literature in several ways....

This paper compares the GDP forecasting performance of alternative factor models based on monthly time series for the French economy. These models are based on static and dynamic principal components. The dynamic principal components are obtained using time and frequency domain methods. The...

In this paper we provide empirical evidence on the impact of US and UK monetary policy changes on credit supply of banks operating in Italy and France over the period 2000-2015, exploring the existence of an international bank lending channel. Exploiting bank balance sheet heterogeneity, we find...

This paper assesses the strength of business cycle synchronization between 1950 and 2014 in a sample of 21 countries using a new quarterly dataset based on IMF archival data. Contrary to the common wisdom, we find that the globalization period is not associated with more output synchronization...

Most European countries suffer from a structural weakness of employment and competitiveness. Can an optimal tax system reinforce European countries in this respect? If so, does this long-term policy act as a devaluation or a revaluation? In this paper, we show that fiscal devaluation can be an...

The large imbalances within euro area have led to renew interest in tax policies that could reduce labour costs and thus improve competitiveness and growth. In this paper, we consider whether it would be more growth-enhancing for euro area countries to, instead, use capital income tax cuts. To...

We examine how euro area (EA) monetary policy and recipient-country prudential policy interact to influence cross-border lending of French banks. We find that monetary spillovers via cross-border lending can be partially offset by prudential measures in receiving countries. We then explore...