Over the past decades, cross-border financial flows have increased in importance and have in many occasions exceeded the underlying current account positions. This phenomenon has been accompanied by an increase in the volume of international equity transactions that accentuate the role of...

The objective of this evaluation is to provide an overall independent assessment of the Commission’s past and current cooperation with Colombia over the period 2002-2011. It also aims at identifying key lessons in order to improve the current and future strategies and programmes of the...

Some transformations occurred in the area of private property ownership following the change of political regime in former socialist or communist countries. The six analysed countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Serbia) illustrate well the whole range of...

A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to effcient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with cross-country consumption ratios. This paper shows that incomplete asset markets and a low price elasticity of tradables can account...

In this note we demonstrate that in affine models for bilateral exchange rates, the nature of return interdependence during crises depends on the tail properties of the fundamentals' distributions. We denote crisis linkages as either strong or weak, in the sense that the dependence remains or...

Within a two-step GARCH framework we explore the linkages between equity returns of ten sectors in the euro area, the United States and Japan, respectively. Our estimation framework allows a distinction to be made between spillover effects originating from one of the three currency areas and...

To measure contagion empirically, we propose using a Bayesian time-varying coefficient model estimated with Markov ChainMonte Carlo methods. The proposed measure works in the joint presence of heteroskedasticity and omitted variables and does not require knowledge of the timing of the crisis. It...

Standard economic models hold that exchange rates are influenced by fundamental variables such as relative money supplies, outputs, inflation rates and interest rates. Nonetheless, it has been well documented that such variables little help predict changes in floating exchange rates u0097 that...

This paper uses the co-incidence of extreme shocks to banksu0092 risk to examine within country and across country contagion among large EU banks. Banksu0092 risk is measured by the first difference of weekly distances to default and abnormal returns. Using Monte Carlo simulations, the paper...