There is widespread evidence of excess return predictability in financial markets. In this paper we examine whether this predictability is related to expectational errors. To consider this issue, we use data on survey expectations of market participants in the stock market, the foreign exchange...

In general equilibrium models, optimal cyclical monetary policy is usually derived around an optimal steady-state inflation level, which in most cases is zero or equal to the negative of the real interest rate. This paper examines whether and how different steady-state inflation levels and...

The timely release of macroeconomic data imposes a distinct structure on the panel: the clustering and sequential ordering of real and nominal variables. We call this orderly release of economic data sequential information flow. The ordered panel generates a new class of restrictions that are...

Over the past decade several countries, including the US, have introduced or redesigned legislation that confers priority in bankruptcy upon all or some bank deposits. We argue that in the presence of contracting costs such rules can increase efficiency. We first show in a private information...

In this paper, we examine external, monetary, and structural determinants of cross-country variation in reserve volatility for 30 emerging market economies from 1973 to 2000. We find that reserve holdings and openess to be the most important determinants of reserve volatility. These results are...

We examine the prudential implications of the co-existence between the standardized approach and the internal ratings-based (IRB) approach, as defined in the new Basle Accord. We consider a model in which sophisticated banks, eligible for the IRB approach, and unsophisticated banks, eligible for...

Price clustering is a well-documented regularity of foreign exchange transactions. In this paper, I present new empirical evidence of price clustering for central bank interventions. A feature of the price clustering in Swiss National Bank (SNB) transactions is market dependency. Evidence of...

Nominal rigidities due to menu costs have become a standard element in closed economy macroeconomic modeling. The "New Open Economy Macroeconomics" literature has investigated the implications of nominal rigidities in an open economy context and found that the currency in which prices are set...

We investigate how the relative contribution of external factors to stock price movements varies with the degree of financial development. We find that financial development makes stock markets more susceptible to external influences (both financial and macroeconomic). Interestingly, this effect...

The recent East Asian crisis has highlighted the relationship between financial development and output volatility. In this essay we develop a simple model of a small open economy producing a tradeable good using a non-tradeable input and where firms access to borrowings and investment depends on...