The financial crisis 2008-2009 and the European sovereign debt crisis have shown that stress on financial markets is important for analyzing and forecasting economic activity. Since financial stress is not directly observable but is presumably reflected in many financial market variables, it is...

The integration of the central and eastern European countries into the international capital markets has been and will be determined by the process of European Union (EU) integration. Our analysis shows that southern and eastern European countries already appear to be surprisingly similar...

The paper discusses the pros and cons of capital account liberalization. Rather than contrasting liberalization and regulation of capital flows as irreconcilable antagonisms, we argue that capital account liberalization requires institutional and regulatory safeguards. Even though the...

Are the measures of the European Stability Mechanism sufficient for preventing further debt crises similar to those in Greece and Portugal? Definitively not, because private investors still enjoy rather high interest rates of dubious government bonds without being adequately involved in bearing...

Changes in exchange rates have become a prominent issue in Germany and Japan - due to the enormous appreciation of the Deutschmark and the Yen. Conventional wisdom suggests that economic activity will be negatively affected if a currency is going through a phase of appreciation. The paper...

In this paper, we develop a financial stress index for France that can be used as a real-time composite indicator for the state of financial stability in France. We take 17 financial variables from different market segments and extract a common stress component using a dynamic approximate factor...

Changes in foreign asset holdings are one channel through which agents adjust to macroeconomic shocks. In this paper, we test whether foreign bank assets change as a result of domestic and foreign macroeconomic shocks. We frame our empirical analysis in a standard new open economy macro model in...

Pecking order models of international finance suggest that countries should become less reliant on international bank lending as they develop. Reduced information costs are one of the factors behind this trend towards disintermediation. This paper presents a simple model on the choice between...

The currency crises of the 1990s all exhibit a divergence of the nominal and the real exchange rate together with an increase in the negative current account. The nominal rate does not reflect inflation differences fully and the ensuing real appreciation leads to a negative current account. This...

The paper examines the effect of trend productivity growth on the determinacy and learnability of equilibria under alternative monetary policy rules. It shows that under a policy rule that responds to current period inflation and the output gap a higher trend growth rate relaxes the conditions...