Intertemporal models of the current account generally assume that global shocks do not affect the current account. We use this assumption to identify global and country-specific shocks in a bivariate VAR. We test the quality of the identification using evidence from G7-data. In accordance with...

Long-run recursive identification schemes are very popular in the structural VAR literature. This note suggests a two-step procedure based on QR decompositions as a solution algorithm for this type of identification problem. Our procedure will always deliver the exact solution and it is much...

Using a panel of 23 industrialised countries, the paper investigates how short-run and long-run income risks are shared and how the source of uncertainty matters for the way this risk gets insured. Surprisingly, short-term and long-term output risks are found to be equally well insured....

Consumption risk sharing among U.S. federal states increases in booms and decreases in recessions. We find that small firms' access to financial markets plays an important role in explaining this stylized fact: business cycle fluctuations in aggregate risk sharing are more pronounced in states...

We explore the impact of mortgage securitization on the international diversification of macroeconomic risk. By making mortgage-related risks internationally tradeable, securitization contributes considerably to better international consumption risk sharing: we find that countries with the most...

In spite of two decades of financial globalization, consumption-based indicators do not seem to signal more international risk sharing. We argue that consumption risk sharing among industrialised countries has actually increased - in particular since the 1990s - but that standard...

Idiosyncratic consumption risk explains more than 60 percent of the cross-sectional variation in quarterly exchange rate changes and currency returns. Our results are obtained from data of 13 industrialized countries and are based on an international version of the consumption capital asset...

This paper documents a marked increase in international consumption risk sharing throughout the recent globalization period. Unlike earlier studies that have found it difficult to document a consistent effect of financial globalization on international consumption comovements, we make use of the...