This paper provides a broad empirical examination of the major currencies' roles in international capital markets, with a special emphasis on the first year of the euro. A contribution is made as to how to measure these roles, both for international financing as well as for international...

This paper examines the investment behavior of different financial institutions in debt securities with a particular focus on their response to price changes. For identification, we use security-level data from the German Microdatabase Securities Holdings Statistics. Our results suggest that...

This paper examines the investment behavior in debt securities across financial institutions with a particular focus on how they respond to price changes. For identification, we use security-level data from the German Microdatabase Securities Holdings Statistics. Our results suggest that banks...

Policymakers fear the potentially destabilizing impact of fickle global investors on emerging markets. Euro area investors are significant participants in emerging bond markets and exhibit volatile flows, but their fickleness does not result in indiscriminate periods of surge and flight....

We exploit individual security holdings data for global mutual funds to distinguish between two reasons why a fund's holdings of emerging market economy (EME) bonds might change: (i) the amount invested in the fund changes and (ii) the fund manager changes portfolio allocations. We find that...

How does sovereign risk affect investors' behavior? We answer this question using a novel database that combines sovereign default probabilities for 27 developed and emerging markets with monthly data on the portfolios of individual bond mutual funds. We first show that changes in yields do not...

Frequent, yet uninformed, fund flows in Chilean pension plans generate substantial trading in currency markets due to the high allocation to international securities. These non-fundamental flows have a significant impact on the Chilean peso, which is estimated to have a relatively low price...

This paper studies the causes and effects of portfolio flows in Malaysia. We use Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) and Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) models to analyse the interactions among portfolio flows, global and domestic macro and financial variables within a common empirical...

This paper empirically investigates international equity investors' foreign portfolios before and during the financial crisis by estimating a gravity model for 22 source and 42 destination countries. The results show that international stock market diversification provides large gains during the...

During the last two decades, the degree of openness of national financial systems has increased substantially. At the same time, asymmetries in information and other financial market frictions have remain prevalent. We study both empirically and theoretically the implications of the opening up...