There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not.We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times,but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageursliquidity providers in normal times, namely their tolerance...

Does distance matter for the volatility of international real and financial transactions? We show that it does, in addition to its well-established relevance for the level of trade. A simple model of trade with endogenous markups shows that demand shocks have a larger impact on trade between...

The Swiss Federal government finances are in an excellent shape: debt is small (and decreasing), and carries a low interest rate. This paper reviews the prospects for the Swiss finances drawing on the recent literature. We argue that the current policy of running surpluses and paying down the...

The Swiss Federal government finances are in an excellent shape: debt is small (and decreasing), and carries a low interest rate. This paper reviews the prospects for the Swiss finances drawing on the recent literature. We argue that the current policy of running surpluses and paying down the...

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...

[...]We begin by discussing the so-called first generation ofmodels, in which crises are viewed in the literature as theunavoidable result of unsustainable policies or fundamentalimbalances. Next, we survey the literature on the secondgeneration of models, which highlights the possibility of...

Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shiftsin fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on selffullling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current assetprice and risk about the future asset price. This...

The use of different currencies in the invoicing of international trade transactions plays a major role in the international transmission of economic fluctuations. Existing studies argue that an exporter’s invoicing choice reflects structural aspects of her industry, such as market share and...