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...

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 as...

In this paper, we study the effects of structural shocks that influence global risk - the main factor behind a "global capital flows cycle" - and how risk, in turn, is transmitted to capital flows. Our results show that not all the risk shocks driving the global financial cycle have the same...

This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the relative importance of global structural shocks for changes in financial conditions across a sample of emerging market economies. We disentangle four key drivers of global financial markets (oil supply shocks, global economic news shocks,...

In the policy debate on the effectiveness of the Global Financial Safety Net, concerns have been raised that expectations of adverse effects of IMF programmes may deter countries from asking for an IMF programme when they need one, a form of "IMF stigma". We explore the existence of IMF...

We document how the distribution of exchange rate returns responds to changes in global financial conditions. We measure global financial conditions as the common component of country-specific financial condition indices, computed consistently across a large panel of developed and emerging...

We present estimates of finance-adjusted output gaps which incorporate the information on the domestic and global credit cycles for a sample of emerging market economies (EMEs). Following recent BIS research, we use a state-space representation of an HP filter augmented with a measure of the...

We study the role and the interaction of the quality of institutions and of counter-cyclical policies in leaning against the Global Financial Cycle (GFC) in Emerging Economies (EMEs). We show that heteroegeneity in institutional strength is a key determinant of the different effects of the GFC...