Both global imbalances and financial market (de-)regulation feature prominently among the potential causes of the global financial crisis, but they have been largely discussed separately. In this paper, we take a different angle and investigate the relationship between financial market...

This paper examines two competing approaches for calculating current account benchmarks, i.e. the external sustainability approach á la Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (LM) versus the structural current accounts literature (SCA) based on panel econometric techniques. The aim is to gauge the medium...

Turkey’s current account deficit widened to almost 10% of GDP in 2011 and has been narrowing only gradually since. An important question is to what extent Turkey’s current account deficit is excessive. To explore this issue, one needs to establish benchmarks. In this paper current account...

This paper analyzes the interest rate setting of the European Central Bank (ECB) both before and after the outbreak of the global financial crisis. In the current monetary policy literature, researchers typically select one Taylor rule-based model in order to analyze the interest rate setting of...

This paper exploits a recent and granular data set for 1,500 German LSIs to conduct a residential mortgage stress testing exercise. To account for model uncertainty when modeling PD dynamics we use a benchmark-constrained Bayesian model averaging approach that combines standard BMA with a...

In this paper we study the impact of model uncertainty, which occurs when linking a stress scenario to default probabilities, on reduced-form credit risk stress testing. This type of uncertainty is omnipresent in most macroeconomic stress testing applications due to short time series for banks'...

Between 1999 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 real exchange rates in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain appreciated relative to the rest of the euro area. This divergence in competitiveness was reflected in the emergence of current account imbalances. Given that exchange rate...

We use a dynamic general-equilibrium model to study how removing barriers to competition in the nontraded goods sector affects the current account of a small open economy. We show that the expansion of the nontraded sector that results from such a "deregulation shock" is associated with an...

This paper contributes to the understanding of the international financial linkages created by US banks by looking at the geographical composition and structure of the balance sheet of foreign branches. The empirical investigation, which is based on a novel dataset containing balance sheet...