The Target liabilities of the GIPS countries (Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain) amounted to 314 billion euros in March 2011. They measure the additional central bank money that their corresponding National Central Banks (NCBs) have loaned in excess of the money needed to cover their domestic...

Rising current account and merchandise trade imbalances marked the years before the global financial and economic crisis. These imbalances either contributed to or precipitated the crisis and to the extent that they create systemic risks, it is desirable that they be reduced. There are many...

In this paper, we provide evidence that expanding firms tend to serve new markets which are geographically close and culturally related to their prior export destinations. We quantify the impact of this spatial pattern using a Chinese firm-level data set. To ensure an exogenous set of potential...

We examine whether the Chinese exchange rate is misaligned and how Chinese trade flows respond to the exchange rate and to economic activity. We find, first, that the Chinese currency, the renminbi (RMB), is substantially below the value predicted by estimates based upon a cross-country sample,...

This paper studies sovereign debt relief in a long-term perspective. We quantify the relief achieved through default and restructuring in two distinct samples: 1920-1939, focusing on the defaults on official (government to government) debt in advanced economies after World War I; and 1978-2010,...

The Pessimists and the Optimists disagree whether the US external deficits and the associated buildup of US net foreign liabilities are problems that require urgent attention. A warning signal should be that the debt ratio deviates significantly from the optimal ratio. The optimal debt ratio or...

This paper takes a financial market perspective in examining the relationship between oil prices, the US dollar and asset prices, and it exploits the heteroskedasticity for the identification of causality in a multifactor model. It finds a bidirectional causality between the US dollar and oil...

The recent financial crises, especially the debt crisis in Asia, have led to questions su ch as: what are their causes, what is an excessive debt and how vulnerable is an economy to external shocks? We develop an economic model of international finance and debt based upon two sources of...

In the automobile industry, as in many tradable goods markets, firms earn their highest market share within their domestic market. This home market advantage persists despite substantial integration of international markets during the past several decades. The goal of this paper is to quantify...

What are the drivers of the large Target2 (T2) balances that have emerged in the European Monetary Union since the start of the financial crisis in 2007? This paper examines the extent to which the evolution of national T2 balances can be statistically associated with cross-border private...