We draw on a new data set on the use of Swiss francs and other currencies by European banks to assess the patterns of foreign currency bank lending. We show that the patterns differ sharply across foreign currencies. The Swiss franc is used predominantly for lending to residents, especially...

The literature on drivers of capital flows stresses the prominent role of global financial factors. Recent empirical work, however, highlights how this role varies across countries and time, and this heterogeneity is not well understood. We revisit this question by focusing on financial...

This paper opens with a short recollection of the Kiel Week Conference of 2002, recorded in a volume edited by Horst Siebert, titled Global Governance: An Architecture for the World Economy. Assess-ments and forecasts made at that time are scored against subsequent developments. Security...

The paper presents labor productivities in the member countries of Euroland. The result is that there is quite a divergence in labor productivities (per head) in the European Monetary Union. The Netherlands and Italy reach 85 percent of the West German level, Spain 62 and Portugal 35. This...

Mercosur countries have witnessed a boom of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows since the early 1990s. However, regional integration, viewed in isolation, was not sufficient for the subregion to regain its attractiveness to FDI. FDI growth in individual Mercosur countries was closely related...

This paper employs an Extreme Value Theory framework to investigate the existence of contagion between European and US banks. The fact that many regulators have no detailed data sets about interbank cross-exposures raises the necessity of finding market-based indicators in order to analyze the...

Banking and balance of payments crises often happen quite simultaneously. We show that the impact of an expected devaluation on the net worth of commercial banks with a short open foreign exchange position speeds up the timing of a balance of payments crisis. We employ an asymmetric information...

Financial globalization has led to a large increase in international asset holdings. While the rise of associated dividend and interest flows has until now been muted by the decreasing trend in interest rates, this pattern could change, leading to a larger role of investment income flows in the...

Official (government-to-government) lending is much larger than commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border capital flows, especially during disasters such as wars, financial crises and natural catastrophes. We assemble the first comprehensive long-run dataset of official...

In the past decade, Germany has been the world champion in exporting capital ("Exportweltmeister"). No other country invested larger amounts of savings outside its borders. However, we find that Germany plays in the third division when it comes to investment performance. To show this, we...