Three of the most important recent facts in global macroeconomics - the sustained rise in the US current account deficit, the stubborn decline in long run real rates, and the rise in the share of US assets in global portfolio - appear as anomalies from the perspective of conventional wisdom and...

We characterize the response of U.S., German and British stock, bond and foreign exchange markets to real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. Our analysis is based on a unique data set of high frequency futures returns for each of the markets. We find that news surprises produce conditional mean...

Market-level microstructure models of asset pricing succeed where dealer-level models do not. This study addresses this empirical difficulty in the context of foreign exchange dealers. New evidence is presented rejecting the latter models' specifications of how information asymmetry and...

The recent political developments in the Middle East have prompted increased scrutiny of the economies of the nations lying in this region. Over the past few months, the financial markets of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have been affected by the speculations that existed before the war in...

This paper analyses whether sovereign default episodes can be seen as contingencies of optimal international lending contracts. The model considers a small open economy with capital accumulation and without commitment to repay debt. Taking first order approximations of Bellman equations, I...

This paper tests for the existence of contagion during the 1997/98 Asian crisis. We interpret contagion as a significant change in the way that country-specific shocks are transmitted across international stock markets. Using the full-information framework of Favero and Giavazzi (2002) we find...

The Europpean Union will enter stage three of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999. The development of euro financial markets and thickness externalities in the use of the Euro as a means of of payment will be the major factors determining the importance of the euro as an international...

This volume contains a collection of papers, commentaries and speeches concerning the first decade of the euro and the recent global financial crisis.

The aim of this paper is to establish the link between the high frequency dynamics of spot exchange rates and developments in the macroeconomy. To do so, I first present a theoretical model of exchange-rate determination that bridges the gap between existing microstructure and traditional...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine empirical characteristics of two commonly mentioned expressions of international financial crisis, “sudden stops” and currency crises. Design/methodology/approach – Sudden stop and currency crisis events are identified and empirical...