This paper quantifies the impact of changes in U.S. monetary policy on sovereign bond spreads in emerging market countries. Specifically, the paper explores empirically how country risk, as proxied by sovereign bond spreads, is influenced by U.S. monetary policy, country-specific fundamentals, and conditions in global capital markets. While country-specific fundamentals are important in explain...

This paper studies international portfolio ßows of US investors to examine the information structure of international equity markets. Based on a model of portfolio choice with both public and private information, we propose new empirical measures of trades due to private information. We show that these trades help explain the cross section of international equity returns, after controlling for ...

How can we determine whether an economy will benefit from membership in a monetary union? While economic theory has proposed a number of widely accepted criteria, virtually all empirical studies apply them as if they were time-invariant. The purpose of this paper is to show that, unless the dynamic nature of these criteria is explicitly taken into account, the results will be flawed and mislead...

Foreign-dominated banking sectors, such as those prevalent in Central and Eastern Europe, are susceptible to two major sources of systemic risk: (i) linkages between local banks and (ii) linkages between a foreign mother bank and its local subsidiary. Using a nonparametric method based on extreme value theory, which accounts for fat-tail shocks, we analyze interdependencies in downward risk in ...

This paper provides compelling evidence that equity market liberalization, as the most efficient way to smooth financial market frictions such as credit constraints, can alleviate persistent cross-dynastic income inequality by promoting increased human capital accumulation. The authors examine the effect of equity market liberalization on inequality by using data from 72 countries for 1980–2006...

This paper investigates the transmission of price and volatility spillovers across the New York, London, Frankfurt and Paris stock markets under the framework of the multivariate EGARCH model. The model is extended to allow dynamic conditional correlations, with the correlations allowed to change with the introduction of the Euro. By using daily closing prices recorded at 16:00 London time (pse...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the intertemporal linkages between FDI and disaggregated measures of international trade. We outline a model exemplifying some of these linkages, describe several methods for investigating two-way feedbacks between various categories of trade, and apply them to the recent experience of developing countries. After controlling for other macroeconomic an...

Human behavior in banking and financial systems is in part made up of a complex mix of political, social and cultural factors. These factors are reflected in expert opinion based political risk scores. Market inefficiency is largely a result of anomalies in human behavior causing information asymmetries. A basic systemic market model is re-specified into a model for international banking system...

The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper analyzes the Corporation of Foreign Bondholders (CFB), an association of British investors holding bonds issued by foreign governm...