Countries differ on the extent to which their financial system relies on banks or on the financial market. We offer a model featuring a possible two way relationship between countries' financial system architecture and their comparative advantage. Countries specialising in bank dependent sectors...

The sharp, secular decline in the world real interest rate of the past thirty years suggests that the surge in global demand for financial assets outpaced the growth in their supply. We argue that this phenomenon was driven by: (i) faster growth in emerging markets, (ii) changes in the financial...

Tracking and monitoring stress within the financial system is a key component of macroprudential policy. This paper introduces a new measure of contemporaneous stress: the Factor based Index of Systemic Stress (FISS). The aim of the index is to capture the common components of data describing...