The paper shows that US monetary policy has been an important determinant of global equity markets. Analysing 50 equity markets worldwide, we find that returns fall on average around 3.8% in response to a 100 basis point tightening of US monetary policy, ranging from a zero response in some to a...

I analyze output growth, volatility, and skewness as the joint outcomes of financial openness. Using an industry panel of 53 countries over 45 years, I find that financial openness increases simultaneously mean growth and the negative skewness of the growth process. The increase in output...

I estimate the transmission of large global volatility shocks in international equity markets from the earlier (pre-1914) to the modern era of globalisation. To that end, I identify 43 such shocks over the period 1885-2011, defined as significant increases in unanticipated volatility in US...

Since the late-1990s, the global economy is characterised by historically low risk premia and an unprecedented widening of external imbalances. This paper explores to what extent these two global trends can be understood as a reaction to three structural shocks in different regions of the global...

We use a threshold VAR analysis to study whether the effects of fiscal policy on economic activity differ depending on financial market conditions. In particular, we investigate the possibility of a non-linear propagation of fiscal developments according to different financial market stress...

In this paper we study the impact of shocks to global risk and global risk aversion (such as Lehman) as well as shocks with a more idiosyncratic nature (such as the euro debt crisis) on cross border portfolio flows, taking the perspective of foreign investors. We find robust evidence of...

This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the relative importance of global structural shocks for changes in financial conditions across a sample of emerging market economies. We disentangle four key drivers of global financial markets (oil supply shocks, global economic news shocks,...