Japan was hit hard by the global financial crisis even though its relatively resilient financial system initially limited the direct impact. The severe collapse of industrial production that followed was no doubt attributable to a confluence of factors, but the paper highlights the impact that...

This paper examines three different explanations of the global financial imbalances. It begins with the neoliberal globalization hypothesis that explains the imbalances as the product of the model of globalization implemented over the past thirty years. It then examines the saving glut and...

We use consumer price data for 205 cities/regions in 21 countries to study PPP deviations before, during and after the major currency crises of the 1990s. We combine data from industrialized nations in North America (Unites States, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal),...

While the 2008-2009 fi nancial 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 fi nancial markets, what can account...

This paper documents the novel fact that Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) decrease bilateral trade imbalances as measured by conventional measure of the net export share in gross trade. While on average an RTA decreases bilateral trade imbalance by 7%, greater trade integration through a deeper...

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...

I introduce commodities and countries' different commodity trade structures into an otherwise standard two-country model to analyze international business cycles between the U.S. and commodity-exporting countries. In the model, only the foreign country (the commodity-exporting country) produces...

Until the 1990s, standard models with two large open economies (i.e. the U.S. and Europe) provided plausible representations of the world economy. However, with the emergence of many countries such as China since then, this approach no longer seems reasonable. In line with this change to the...

I identify new patterns in countries' economic performance over the 2007-2014 period based on proximity through distance, trade, and finance to the US subprime mortgage and Eurozone debt crisis areas. To understand the causes of the cross-country variation, I develop an open economy model with...

I identify new patterns in countries' recoveries following the 2008 Global Crisis based on proximity through distance, trade, and finance to the US subprime mortgage and Eurozone debt crisis zones. To understand the causes of the cross-country variation in recoveries, I develop an open economy...