We analyze current account imbalances through the lens of the two largest surplus countries; China and Germany. We observe two striking patterns visible since the 2007/8 Global Financial Crisis. First, while China has been gradually reducing its current account surplus, Germany's surplus has...

We study China's illicit capital flow and document a change in its pattern. Specifically, we observe that China's capital flight, especially the one measured by trade misinvoicing, exhibits a weakened response in the post-2007 period to the covered interest disparity, which is a theoretical...

In this paper, we investigate whether foreign currency accounts help overcome credit constraints in developing countries. We analyze a novel bank-level data set from Nepal, where a steady inflow of remittances has contributed to foreign currency deposits on commercial bank balance sheets. In...

In the winter 2011/12 a wave of internal capital flight prompted the ECB to abandon its exit strategy and to announce an unprecedented monetary expansion. We analyze this episode in several dimensions: (i) by providing an event-study analysis covering key variables from national central banks'...

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...

While illicit capital flight is a major concern of policy makers in developing countries, there is only little research on the possible link between capital flight and development aid. In this paper, we address the issue for Nepal, a stereotypical financially-closed developing economy that is...

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...