In this paper we empirically explore how characteristics of the domestic financial system influence the international allocation of consumption risk using a sample of OECD countries. Our results show that the extent of risk sharing achieved does not depend on the overall development of the...

Kocherlakota and Pistaferri (EJ, 2007) [KP] develop a model of a world economy with private-information Pareto optimal (PIPO) risk sharing; in that model, the real exchange rate tracks relative domestic/foreign cross-sectional distributions of consumption. KP claim that the PIPO model fits the...

In this paper we empirically explore how characteristics of the domestic financial system influence the international allocation of consumption risk using a sample of OECD countries. Our results show that the extent of risk sharing achieved does not depend on the overall development of the...

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 the data country portfolios are heavily biased toward domestic assets. Standard one-good international macro models predict that, due to the presence of non-diversifiable labor income risk, country portfolios should be heavily biased toward foreign assets; this discrepancy constitute the...

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...

While Switzerland's net creditor position is sizable, it has long remained steady despite large and persistent current account surpluses. This pattern reflects valuation losses on Swiss foreign assets driven by movements in exchange rates and assets prices. We compute estimates of these...

This paper studies the impact of capital market distortions on misallocation, competition and aggregate productivity. Focusing on distortions in the access to international borrowing across firms, I show that a reduction in these distortions leads to an increase in aggregate productivity through...

Recent contributions have shown that it is possible to account for the so-called consumption-real exchange anomaly in models with goods market frictions where international asset trade is limited to a riskless bond. In this paper, we consider a more realistic international asset market structure...

We show that recent explanations of the consumption-real exchange rate anomaly which rely on goods and financial market frictions are not robust to introducing just one additional international asset. When portfolios are selected optimally, international trade in two nominal bonds implies a...