It is a matter of debate in how far credit ratings contribute to allocative efficiency or to excessive volatility of asset prices and cross-border capital flows. Yet it is generally taken for granted that ratings play a significant role in the transnationalization of financial relations. This...

This paper studies the impact of financial openness on the size of government, and other key economic variables, such as the consumption-wealth ratio, the growth rate of wealth, and welfare, in a two-country world, based on a portfolio approach, assuming that public spending is...

In this study, the main purpose is to analyze the factors that stimulate the probability of financial crises. The period of analysis covers the years of 1970-2008, thereby including the impact of recent global financial crisis. The analysis aims to make a comparison for the developed and...

Between 1999 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 real exchange rates in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain appreciated relative to the rest of the euro area. This divergence in competitiveness was reflected in the emergence of current account imbalances. Given that exchange rate...

This paper uses fractional integration and cointegration in order to model the DM/dollar and the yen/dollar real exchange rates in terms of both monetary and real factors, more specifically real interest rate and labour productivity differentials. We find that whilst the individual series may be...

In this paper we decompose the Serial Correlation Common Feature (SCCF) of Engle and Kozicki (1993) in the frequency domain. A collection of time series is said to share a common cycle if there exists a linear combination of the predicted series with a zero spectral density at some frequency....

This paper analyzes deviations from uncovered interest rate parity which are interpreted as indicator of the substitutability of currencies. Backward recursive statistical tests and error correction models are applied to study the co-movement of interest rates, and rolling regressions are used...

We apply a structural dynamic factor model to a large quarterly dataset covering 38 countries between 2002 and 2011 to analyze China's role in global inflation dynamics. We identify Chinese supply and demand shocks and examine their contributions to global price dynamics and the transmission...

How does technical progress affect long-term unemployment in a small open economy? This relationship is evaluated in an open neoclassical growth model that is extended by a Pissarides-style labor market matching approach. In the general equilibrium model, the labor market of the three factor...

The unbiasedness hypothesis - the joint hypothesis of uncovered interest parity (UIP) and rational expectations - has been almost universally rejected in studies of exchange rate movements. In contrast to previous studies, which have used short-horizon data, we test this hypothesis using...