The past decade has witnessed an explosion of papers estimating gravity equations for cross-border financial holdings. The aim of the paper is to develop a theoretical foundation for the empirical gravity literature applied to finance. The gravity specification is closely analogous to that...

Recent research has shown that relaxing the assumptions of complete information and common knowledge in exchange rate models can shed light on a wide range of important exchange rate puzzles. In this chapter, we review a number of models we have developed in previous work that relax the strong...

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...

While the 2008-2009 financial 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 financial markets, what can account...

While the 2008-2009 financial 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 financial markets, what can account...

Recent crises have seen large spikes in asset price risk. We propose an explanation for such panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in beliefs about risk. A negative link between the current level and the future risk of an asset price leads to a circular relationship between the stochastic...

The 2008 –2009 financial crises, while originating in the United States, witnessed a drop in asset prices and output that was at least as large in the rest of the world. We investigate, in the context of a simple two-country model, whether this could have been the result of transmission...

Recent episodes (October 2008, May 2010, August 2011) have witnessed huge spikes in equity price risk (implied volatility). Apart from their large size, several features characterize these risk panics. They are global phenomena, shared among a broad set of countries. There is substantial...

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...