In the current international monetary system, the adjustment mechanism does not work properly to eliminate the excessive surpluses/deficits on the current accounts of the major countries that participate in international trade. Consequently, the adjustment changes do not take place in an...

This would seem an opportune moment to reshape banking systems in the Americas. But any effort to rethink and improve banking must acknowledge three major barriers. The first is a crisis of vision: there has been too little consideration of what kind of banking system would work best for...

Consumption risk sharing among U.S. federal states increases in booms and decreases in recessions. We find that small firms' access to credit markets plays an important role in explaining this stylized fact: business cycle fluctuations in aggregate risk sharing are more pronounced in states in...

This paper addresses and resolves the issue of microstructure noise when measuring the relative importance of home and U.S. market in the price discovery process of Canadian interlisted stocks. In order to avoid large bounds for information shares, previous studies applying the Cholesky...

To what extent do national borders and national currencies impose costs that segment markets across countries? To answer this question the authors use a dataset with product-level retail prices and wholesale costs for a large grocery chain with stores in the United States and Canada. They...

Global games of regime change – coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attacks it – have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks, bank runs, debt crises, and political change. We extend...

China and the U.S. have a close but complicated economic relationship. This note provides a fuller picture of the tightening embrace between the two countries – in terms of flows of goods and services, financial capital and people – and discusses the potential flashpoints in this...

Why are foreigners willing to invest almost $2 trillion per year in the United States? The answer affects if the existing pattern of global imbalances can persist and if the United States can continue to finance its current account deficit without a major change in asset prices and returns. This...

This paper develops a multi-sector New Keynesian model of a small open economy that includes commodity, manufacturing, non-tradable, and import sectors. Price and wage rigidities are sector specific, modelled à la Calvo-Yun style contracts. Labour and capital are imperfectly mobile across...

Orthodox and heterodox theories of financial crises are hereby compared from a theoretical viewpoint, with emphasis on their genesis. The former view (represented by the fourthgeneration models of Paul Krugman) reflects the neoclassical vision whereby turbulence is an exception; the latter...