This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

We analyse the effect of the uncertainty about the fundamentals on the probability of sudden stops of capital flows from a theoretical and empirical perspective. Our model predicts that the probability of crises increases with the uncertainty, ie. the dispersion of private signals about the true...

We investigate the relative roles of US economic policy uncertainty andglobal risk aversion in contributing to financial and macroeconomic fluctuations in small open economies (SOEs) using a panel of forty SOEs that includes both advanced economies (AEs) and emerging markets economies (EMEs). We...

We provide empirical evidence that risk sharing enhances specialization in production. First, we calculate an index of specialization for each of the European Community (EC) and non-EC OECD countries, U.S. states, Canadian provinces, Japanese prefectures, Latin American countries, and regions of...