There is widespread evidence of excess return predictability in financial markets. In this paper we examine whether this predictability is related to expectational errors. To consider this issue, we use data on survey expectations of market participants in the stock market, the foreign exchange...

Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shifts in fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current asset price and risk about the future asset price....

There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not. We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times, but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageurs liquidity providers in normal times, namely their...

Modern open economy macro models assume the continuous adjustment of international portfolio allocation. We introduce gradual portfolio adjustment into a global equity market model. Our approach differs from related literature in two key dimensions. First, the time interval between portfolio...

The objective of this paper is to show that the proposal by Froot and Thaler (1990) of delayed portfolio adjustment can account for a broad set of puzzles about the relationship between interest rates and exchange rates. The puzzles include: i) the delayed overshooting puzzle; ii) the forward...

While the 2008-2009 fi nancial crisis originated in the United States, we witnessed steep declines in output, consumption and investment of similar magnitudes around the globe. This raises two questions. First, given the observed strong home bias in goods and fi nancial markets, what can account...

This paper offers empirical evidence that real exchange rate volatility can have a significant impact on the long-term rate of productivity growth, but the effect depends critically on a country's level of financial development. For countries with relatively low levels of financial development,...

Despite international financial disintegration, we document a dramatic increase in dollar borrowing among leveraged Eurozone corporates during the Great Financial Crisis. Using loan-level data, we trace this increase to the twin crisis in the credit market and in funding markets. The reduction...

The Sovereign Money Initiative will be submitted to the Swiss people in 2018. This paper reviews the arguments behind the initiative and discusses its potential impact. I argue that several arguments are inconsistent with empirical evidence or with economic logic. In particular, controlling...

An unintended consequence of loose US monetary policy is the increase in currency risk exposure abroad. Using firm-level data on corporate bond issuances in 17 emerging market economies (EME) between 2003 and 2015, we find that EME companies are more likely to issue bonds in foreign currency...