This paper analyses the impact of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) on global financial markets. It presents back-of-the-envelope calculations which simulate the potential impact of a transfer of traditional foreign exchange reserves to SWFs on global capital flows. If SWFs behave as CAPM-type...

The recent corporate failures in the US and in Europe have considerably damaged investors’ confidence in the functioning of financial markets and the ability of the regulatory framework to safeguard their interest and prevent fraud. These episodes demonstrate that market failures exist, which...

The paper takes a closer look at the institutional set-up of financial markets in the United States of America and investigates whether the US can serve as a model for the EU. The overall conclusion is that the US institutional set-up as a whole does not seem to be a suitable benchmark for the...

Global financial integration has been associated with divergent patterns of real convergence and the current account in emerging markets. While countries in emerging Asia have been running sizeable current account surpluses, countries in emerging Europe have been facing large current account...