There is already a substantial literature documenting the fact that low yield currencies typically appreciate during times of global financial stress and behave as safe havens. The main objective of this paper is to find out what the fundamentals of safe haven currencies are. We analyse a large...

We exploit the 2007-2009 financial crisis to analyze how risk relates to bank business models. Institutions with higher risk exposure had less capital, larger size, greater reliance on short-term market funding, and aggressive credit growth. Business models related to significantly reduced bank...

We use EU sovereign bond yield and CDS spreads daily data to carry out an event study analysis on the reaction of government yield spreads before and after announcements from rating agencies (Standard & Poor's, Moody's, Fitch). Our results show: significant responses of government bond yield...

This paper provides an empirical assessment of interdependence and contagion across three asset classes (bonds, stocks, and currencies) for over 60 economies over the period 1998 to 2011. Using a global VAR, we test for changes in the transmission mechanism – both within and cross-market...

In this paper we attempt to evaluate the quantitative impact of financial shocks on key indicators of real activity and financial conditions. We focus on financial shocks as they have received wide attention in the recent literature and in the policy debate after the global financial crisis. We...

The empirical literature on systemic banking crises (SBCs) has shown that SBCs are rare events that break out in the midst of credit intensive booms and bring about particularly deep and long-lasting recessions. We attempt to explain these phenomena within a dynamic general equilibrium model...

The causes of the 2008 collapse and subsequent surge in global capital flows remain an open and highly controversial issue. Employing a factor model coupled with a dataset of high-frequency portfolio capital flows to 50 economies, the paper finds that common shocks – key crisis events as well...

Existing evidence suggests that protectionist activity since the financial crisis has been muted, raising the question whether the historically well-documented relationship between growth, real exchange rates and trade protectionism has broken down. This paper re-visits this relationship for the...

We propose a model for analyzing euro area trade based on the interaction between macroeconomic and trade variables. First, we show that macroeconomic variables are necessary to generate accurate short-term trade forecasts; this result can be explained by the high correlation between trade and...

This paper builds a macro-prudential tool designed to assess whether the banking sector is adequately prepared to orderly withstand losses resulting from normal or stressed macroeconomic and micro-economic scenarios. The link between the banking sector and the real sector is established via the...