This paper analyses the importance of common factors in shaping non-fuel commodity price movements for the period 1957-2008. For this purpose, a dynamic factor model is estimated using Kalman Filtering techniques. Based on this set-up we are able to separate common and idiosyncratic developments...

The contribution of this paper is to revisit the Early Warning System (EWS) literature by analysing selected episodes of financial market crisis, i.e. those preceded by a spell of credit and real estate expansions. The aim is to disentangle instances when this constitutes a natural phenomenon...

Inflation has been well contained over the last decades in most industrialized countries. This implies, however, that memories of high inflation are likely to fade, because over time larger parts of the population have never experienced high inflation, whereas those who have might forget. This...

This paper reviews three different concepts of equilibrium exchange rates that are widely used in policy analysis and constitute the backbone of the IMF CGER assessment: the Macroeconomic Balance, the External Sustainability and the reduced form approaches. We raise a number of econometric...

This paper studies net foreign assets and the differential returns between gross foreign assets and liabilities for a sample of 49 countries between 1981 and 2007. It shows that investment income is more important than capital gains in imparting a drift to net foreign assets over the long-run,...

The curse of dimensionality, a problem associated with analyzing the interaction of a relatively large number of endogenous macroeconomic variables, is a prevailing issue in the open economy macro literature. The most common practise to mitigate this problem is to apply the so-called Small Open...

The notable increase in international reserve holdings over the past decade and their use during the global financial crisis of 2008/2009 has sparked renewed interest in the analysis of the optimal level of reserve holdings, in particular in countries which are subject to sudden stops. Less...

Global bonds are international securities designed to be traded and settled efficiently in multiple markets. This paper studies global bonds to examine the effects of multimarket trading on corporate bond liquidity, prices, and the cost of debt. Using a sample of primary and secondary market...