This paper examines international debt issuance through Irish-resident Special Purpose Entities (SPEs). Using a unique new dataset covering the population of Irish-resident SPEs reporting to the Central Bank of Ireland over the period 2005-2017, we identify cross-country debt financing links...

We assess monetary convergence preceding the implementation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) through Kalman filtering estimates of the risk premium of eleven forward exchange rates of European and non-European currencies. Since all participating currencies are in effect identical from...

This paper presents a new concept the global roles of currencies. The concept combines the domestic and international (cross-border) use of currencies and therefore captures the overall importance of different currencies in a globalised economy. The measure of a currency's global role is based...

We provide the first cross-country evidence of the effect of investment by private equity firms on innovation, focusing on a sample of European countries and using Kortum and Lerner's (2000) empirical methodology. Using an 18-country panel covering the period 1991-2004, we study how private...

This paper studies the long-run evolution of bank risk and its links to the macroeconomy. Using data for 17 advanced economies, we show that the riskiness of bank assets declined materially between 1870 and 2016. But even though bank assets have become safer, the losses on these assets are...

Does distance matter for the volatility of international real and financial transactions? We show that it does, in addition to its well-established relevance for the level of trade. A simple model of trade with endogenous markups shows that demand shocks have a larger impact on trade between...

This paper studies export adjustment to negative shocks in currency unions. I consider the hitherto ignored role of trade costs and taxes in internal devaluations, which have been brought to the fore of international policy during the recent euro periphery crisis. Trade costs can limit the...

The literature on fiscal multipliers finds that spending-based fiscal consolidations tend to have more benign macro-economic consequences than revenue-based consolidations. By directly comparing ex-post data with consolidation plans, we present evidence of a systematically weaker follow-up of...

Identifying fiscal multipliers is usually constrained by the absence of a counterfactual scenario. Our new data set allows overcoming this problem by making use of the fact that recommendations under the EU's excessive deficit procedure (EDP) provide both a baseline no-policy-change scenario and...

Governments often issue bonds in foreign jurisdictions, which can provide additional legal protection vis-á-vis domestic bonds. This paper studies the effect of this jurisdiction choice on bond prices. We test whether foreign-law bonds trade at a premium compared to domestic-law bonds. We use...