The current environment is characterized by low real rates and by policy rates close to or at their lower bound in all major financial areas. We analyze these unusual economic conditions from a historical perspective and draw some implications for external imbalances, safe asset demand and the...

We revisit the debate on the benefits of financial integration in a two-country neoclassical growth model with aggregate uncertainty. Our framework accounts simultaneously for gains from a more efficient capital allocation and gains from risk sharing-together with their interaction. In our...

We analyze the workings of the "Global Financial Cycle." We study the effects of monetary policy of the United States, the center country of the international monetary system, on the joint dynamics of the domestic business cycle and international financial variables such as global credit growth,...

We review the findings of the literature on the benefits of international financial flows and find that they are quantitatively elusive. We then present evidence on the existence of a global cycle in gross cross border flows, asset prices and leverage and discuss its impact on monetary policy...

We provide an overview of the recent developments of the literature on the determinants of long term capital flows, global imbalances and valuation effects. We present the main stylized facts of the new international financial landscape in which external balance sheets of countries have grown in...

Home bias is a perennial feature of international capital markets. We review various explanations of this puzzling phenomenon highlighting recent developments in macroeconomic modelling that incorporate international portfolio choices in standard two-country general equilibrium models. We refer...

This paper studies the geography of wealth transfers during the 2008 global financial crisis. We construct valuation changes on bilateral external positions in equity, direct investment and portfolio debt at the height of the crisis to map who benefited and who lost on their external exposure....

The European Central Bank is unique in setting monetary policy for several sovereign states with heterogeneous debt levels and different maturity structures. The monetary-fiscal nexus is central to the functioning of the euro area. We focus on one particular aspect of that nexus, the effect the...

We introduce a novel empirical decomposition of equity price growth rates in terms of equity holdings, based on market-clearing conditions. Although our sample holdings cover only an average of 5% of market capitalization, our reconstructed equity holdings account for, on average, 89% of the...

Despite a formal 'no-bailout clause', we estimate significant net present value transfers from the European Union to Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, ranging from roughly 0.5% (Ireland) to 43% (Greece) of 2011 output during the recent Eurozone crisis. We propose a model to analyze...