Though financial globalization should improve international risk sharing, empirical support is lacking. We develop a simple welfare-based measure that captures how far countries are from the ideal of perfect risk sharing. Applying it to data, we find some evidence that international risk sharing...

Though theory suggests financial globalization should improve international risk sharing, empirical support has been limited. We develop a simple welfare-based measure that captures how far countries are from the ideal of perfect risk sharing. We then take it to data and find international risk...

Should monetary policy react to stock prices? The answer depends on whether stock prices are good predictors of future economic activity. Using long annual time-series data for the G-7 countries, data going back over 150 years for some countries, we find that stock prices do not systematically...

In the 1990s, currency crises in Europe, Mexico and Southeast Asia have drawn worldwide attention to speculative attacks on government-controlled exchange rates. To improve our understanding of these events, researchers have undertaken new theoretical and empirical work. In this paper, we...

We use a simple model of international lending to show that an emerging market borrower who might default can be shut out of international capital markets without warning. A modest haircut on obligations, for example, can shut down lending. Copyright © 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation ©...

A developing country often pegs its exchange rate to a single currency, such as the U.S. dollar, even though it faces a higher inflation rate than the country to which it is pegged. As a consequence, it experiences real exchange-rate misalignments and a series of easily-anticipated devaluations....