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We thank Danny Yagan, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick for helpful discussions and comments. Funding from the Center for Equitable Growth at UC Berkeley, the Sandler foundation, and the Stone foundation is thankfully acknowledged. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

This paper analyzes the impact of fiscal spending shocks in a multi-country model with international production networks. In contrast to standard results suggesting that production network linkages are unimportant for the aggregate response to macro shocks in a closed economy, we show that network structures may place a central role in the international propagation of fiscal shocks, particularly when wages are slow to adjust. The paper first develops a simple general equilibrium multi-country model and derives some analytical results on the response to fiscal spending shocks. We then apply the model to an analysis of fiscal spillovers in the Eurozone, using the calibrated sectoral network structure from the World Input Output Database (WIOD). In a version of the model with sticky wages, we find that fiscal spillovers from Germany and some other large Eurozone countries may be large, and within the range of empirical estimates. More importantly, we find that the Eurozone production network is very important for the international spillovers. In the absence of international production network linkages, spillovers would be only a third as large as predicted by the baseline model. Finally, we explore the diffusion of identified German government spending at the sectoral level, both within and across countries. We find that government expenditures have both significant upstream and downstream effects when these links are measured by the direction of sectoral production linkages.

International audience; We develop a model of cross-border acquisitions in which the foreign acquirer's ownership choice reflects a trade-off between easing the target's credit constraints and the costs of operating in an environment with weak institutions. Data on domestic and foreign acquisitions in emerging markets over the period 1990–2007 support the model predictions. The share of full foreign acquisitions is higher in sectors more reliant on external finance, in countries with lower financial development, and in countries with higher institutional quality. Sectoral external finance dependence accentuates the effect of country-level financial development and institutional quality. By contrast, the level of foreign ownership in partial acquisitions is insensitive to institutional factors and depends weakly on financial factors.

International audience; This paper combines national accounts, survey, wealth and fiscal data (including recently released tax data on high-income taxpayers) in order to provide consistent series on the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in Russia from the Soviet period until the present day. We find that official survey-based measures vastly under-estimate the rise of inequality since 1990. According to our benchmark estimates, top income shares are now similar to (or higher than) the levels observed in the United States. We also find that inequality has increased substantially more in Russia than in China and other ex-communist countries in Eastern Europe. We relate this finding to the specific transition strategy followed in Russia. According to our benchmark estimates, the wealth held offshore by rich Russians is about three times larger than official net foreign reserves, and is comparable in magnitude to total household financial assets held in Russia.

NBER Working Paper No. 24623; We develop a method for comparing levels and trends in inequality in mortality in the United States and France between 1990 and 2010 in a similar framework. The comparison shows that while income inequality has increased in both the United States and France, inequality in mortality in France remained remarkably low and stable. In the United States, inequality in mortality increased for older groups (especially women) while it decreased for children and young adults. These patterns highlight the fact that despite the strong cross-sectional relationship between income and health, there is no necessary connection between changes in income inequality and changes in health inequality.

NBER Working Paper No. 24623; We develop a method for comparing levels and trends in inequality in mortality in the United States and France between 1990 and 2010 in a similar framework. The comparison shows that while income inequality has increased in both the United States and France, inequality in mortality in France remained remarkably low and stable. In the United States, inequality in mortality increased for older groups (especially women) while it decreased for children and young adults. These patterns highlight the fact that despite the strong cross-sectional relationship between income and health, there is no necessary connection between changes in income inequality and changes in health inequality.

International audience; This paper investigates the role of individual firms in international business-cycle comovement using data covering the universe of French firm-level value added and international linkages over the period 1993-2007. At the micro level, trade and multinational linkages with a particular foreign country are associated with a significantly higher correlation between a firm and that foreign country. The impact of direct linkages on comovement at the micro level has significant macro implications. Without those linkages the correlation between France and foreign countries would fall by about 0.098, or one-third of the observed average correlation of 0.291 in our sample of partner countries. (JEL F14, F23, F44, F62, L14) Countries that exhibit greater bilateral trade and multinational production linkages have more correlated business cycles (Frankel and Rose 1998; Kleinert, Martin, and Toubal 2015). While the empirical literature has repeatedly confirmed the trade-comovement relationship in the data, its meaning is not well understood, either empirically or quantitatively. Taken at face value, the positive association between bilateral trade and multinational linkages and comovement is often interpreted as evidence of transmission of shocks across countries through those linkages. The empirical literature has faced two related challenges. The first is the critique by Imbs (2004) that countries that trade more with each other are similar in other ways, and thus subject to common shocks. Under an extreme version of this view, the trade linkage variable in the Frankel-Rose specification does not reflect the

This paper combines national accounts, survey, wealth and fiscal data (including recently released tax data on high - income taxpayers) in order to provide consistent series on the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in China over the 1978 2015 period. We find that the aggregate national wealth - income ratio has increased from 350% in 1978 to 700% in 2015. This can be accounted for by a combination of high saving and investment rates and a gradual rise in relative asset prices, reflecting changes in the legal system of property. The share of public property in national wealth has declined from about 70% in 1978 to 30% in 2015, which is still a lot higher than in rich countries (close to 0% or negative). Next, we provide sharp upward revision of official inequality estimates. The top 10% income share rose from 27% to 41% of national income between 1978 and 2015, while the bottom 50% shar e dropped from 27% to 15%. China’s inequality levels used to be close to Nordic countries and are now approaching U.S. levels.

Studies of long-run evolution of the fi nance industry have largely focused tudies of long-run evolution of the fi nance industry have largely focused on the United States. These studies reveal three key facts: 1) the share of on the United States. These studies reveal three key facts: 1) the share of aggregate income spent on fi nancial intermediation is time varying; 2) the aggregate income spent on fi nancial intermediation is time varying; 2) the unit cost of fi nancial intermediation is relatively fl at; and 3) the pattern of changes unit cost of fi nancial intermediation is relatively fl at; and 3) the pattern of changes in human capital and wages in fi nance relative to the whole economy exhibits a in human capital and wages in fi nance relative to the whole economy exhibits a U-shape over the twentieth century. In this paper, we ask whether these facts hold U-shape over the twentieth century. In this paper, we ask whether these facts hold for a set of other economies with similar levels of development. for a set of other economies with similar levels of development. Over the long run, the US fi nancial sector has grown in two waves: The fi rst Over the long run, the US fi nancial sector has grown in two waves: The fi rst lasted from (at least) 1860 to the 1930s; and then, following a sharp decline, the lasted from (at least) 1860 to the 1930s; and then, following a sharp decline, the second wave starts in 1950 and lasts to the present. The long-run trend of second wave starts in 1950 and lasts to the present. The long-run trend of the income share of fi nance in the United States is similar to that in a number the income share of fi nance in the United States is similar to that in a number of other now-industrial economies, although—as Figure 1 illustrates—the exact of other now-industrial economies, although—as Figure 1 illustrates—the exact pattern varies by country. A few features in Figure 1 stand out. First, in all of pattern varies by country. A few features in Figure 1 stand out. First, in all of these countries—except Finland, for a brief period—fi nance’s share of income these countries—except Finland, for a brief period—fi nance’s share of income today is signifi cantly higher than it has been during the last 150 years. Second, today is signifi cantly higher than it has been during the last 150 years. Second, the overall trend is upward, although periods of decline are evident; in particular, the overall trend is upward, although periods of decline are evident; in particular, there are sharp drops in Australia after 1888 and in Canada and the United States there are sharp drops in Australia after 1888 and in Canada and the United States after 1933 following severe depressions. Third, while the Netherlands, the United after 1933 following severe depressions. Third, while the Netherlands, the United

International audience; We establish the following stylized facts: (1) Exports are characterized by Big Hits, (2) the Big Hits change from one period to the next, and (3) these changes are not explained by global factors like global commodity prices. These conclusions are robust to excluding extractable products (oil and minerals) and other commodities. Moreover, African Big Hits exhibit similar patterns as Big Hits in non-African countries. We also discuss some concerns about data quality. These stylized facts are inconsistent with the traditional view that sees African exports as a passive commodity endowment, where changes are driven mostly by global commodity prices. In order to better understand the determinants of export success in Africa we interviewed several exporting entrepreneurs, government officials and NGOs. Some of the determinants that we document are conventional: moving up the quality ladder, utilizing strong comparative advantage, trade liberalization, investment in technological upgrades, foreign ownership, ethnic networks, and personal foreign experience of the entrepreneur. Other successes are triggered by idiosyncratic factors like entrepreneurial persistence, luck, and cost shocks, and some of the successes occur in areas that usually fail.

International audience; Can directed technical change be used to combat climate change? We construct new firm-level panel data on auto industry innovation distinguishing between “dirty” (internal combustion engine) and “clean” (e.g., electric, hybrid, and hydrogen) patents across 80 countries over several decades. We show that firms tend to innovate more in clean (and less in dirty) technologies when they face higher tax-inclusive fuel prices. Furthermore, there is path dependence in the type of innovation (clean/dirty) both from aggregate spillovers and from the firm’s own innovation history. We simulate the increases in carbon taxes needed to allow clean technologies to overtake dirty technologies.

International audience; We propose a theory that rising globalization and rising wage inequality are related because trade liberalization raises the demand facing highly competitive skill-intensive firms. In our model, only the lowest-cost firms participate in the global economy exactly along the lines of Melitz (2003). In addition to differing in their productivity, firms differ in their skill intensity. We model skill-biased technology as a correlation between skill intensity and technological acumen, and we estimate this correlation to be large using firm-level data from Chile in 1995. A fall in trade costs leads to both greater trade volumes and an increase in the relative demand for skill, as the lowest-cost/most-skilled firms expand to serve the export market while less skill-intensive non-exporters retrench in the face of increased import competition. This mechanism works regardless of factor endowment differences, so we provide an explanation for why globalization and wage inequality move together in both skill-abundant and skill-scarce countries. In our model countries are net exporters of the services of their abundant factor, but there are no Stolper-Samuelson effects because import competition affects all domestic firms equally.

We explore a new panel data set on bilateral gross cross-border equity flows between 14 countries, 1989–1996. We show that a “gravity” model explains international transactions in financial assets at least as well as goods trade transactions. Gross transaction flows depend on market size in source and destination country as well as trading costs, in which both information and the transaction technology play a role. Distance proxies some information costs, and other variables explicitly represent information transmission, an information asymmetry between domestic and foreign investors, and the efficiency of transactions. The geography of information is the main determinant of the pattern of international transactions, while there is weak support in our data for the diversification motive, once we control for the informational friction. We broaden the scope of our results by presenting some evidence linking the results on equity transactions to equity holdings.

International audience; This paper studies the evolution of sectoral labor concentration in relation to the level of per capita income. We show that various measures of sectoral concentration follow a U-shaped pattern across a wide variety of data sources: countries first diversify, in the sense that labor is spread more equally across sectors, but there exists, relatively late in the development process, a point at which they start to specialize again. We introduce a model with endogenous costs of trading internationally that provides an explanation for this new empirical fact. The model highlights a trade-off between the benefits of diversification in the context of high trading costs, and the benefits of specialization in a Ricardian sense.

International audience; This paper examines the causal effect of parental schooling on children’s schooling using a large sample of adoptees from Taiwan. Using birth-parents’ education to help control for selective placement of children with adoptive parents, we find that adoptees raised with more highly educated parents have higher educational attainment, measured by years of schooling and probability of university graduation. We also find evidence that adoptive father’s schooling is more important for sons’ and adoptive mother’s schooling is more important for daughters’ educational attainment. These results support the notion that family environment (nurture) is important in determining children’s educational outcomes, independent of genetic endowment.

Information collection, processing and dissemination financial institutions is challenging. This can delay the observation by traders of the exact capital charges and constraints of their institution. During this delay, traders face preference uncertainty. In this context, we study optimal trading strategies and equilibrium prices in a continuous centralized market. We focus on liquidity shocks, during which preference uncertainty is likely to matter most. Preference uncertainty generates allocative ineficiency, but need not reduce prices. Traders progressively learning about the preferences of their institution conduct round-trip trades, which generate excess volume relative to the frictionless market. In a cross section of liquidity shocks, the initial price drop is positively correlated with total trading volume. Across traders, the number of round-trips is negatively correlated with trading profits and average inventory.

When faced with a run on a “systemically important” but insolvent bank in 1889, the Banque de France pre-emptively organized a lifeboat to ensure that depositors were protected and an orderly liquidation could proceed. To protect the Banque from losses on its lifeboat loan, a guarantee syndicate was formed, penalizing those who had participated in the copper speculation that had caused the crisis bringing the bank down. Creation of the syndicate and other actions were consistent with mitigating the moral hazard from such an intervention. This episode contrasts the advice given by Bagehot to the Bank of England to counter a panic by lending freely at a high rate on good collateral, allowing insolvent institutions to fail.

There is considerable interest among policy-makers in documenting short-term effects of science funding. A multiyear scientific journey that leads to long-term fruits of research, such as a moon landing, is more tangible if there is visible nearer-term activity, such as the presence of astronauts. Yet systematic data on such activities have not heretofore existed. The only source of information for describing the production of most science is surveys that have been called “a rough estimate, frequently based on unexamined assumptions that originated years earlier” ( 1 ).

International audience; Using a unique matched employer-employee dataset on Taiwanese manufacturing, we examine the impact of foreign direct investment in China on domestic employment adjustments controlling for firm and worker heterogeneity as well as for potential endogeneity of firms' expansion in China. Our findings suggest that workers employed at firms with higher levels of investment in China are more likely to leave the firm, compared with workers at firms with zero or lower levels of investment in China. We provide evidence that foreign expansion in China decreases worker employment security at parent companies, particularly for low-skilled workers. Employment adjustments through employer-to-employer transitions are found to be highly associated with wage losses, with the strongest wage effects for low-skilled workers who shift employment between industries. Moreover, we find no evidence that FDI in China contributes to skill upgrading at parent companies. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Mimeo, 2010; We study the reaction of financial markets to aggregate liquidity shocks when traders face cognition limits. While each financial institution recovers from the shock at a random time, the trader representing the institution observes this recovery with a delay, reecting the time it takes to collect and process information about positions, counterparties and risk exposure. Cognition limits lengthen the recovery process. They also imply that traders who find their institution has not yet recovered from the shock place market sell orders, and then progressively buy back at relatively low prices, while simultaneously placing limit orders to sell later when the price will have recovered. This generates round trip trades, which raise trading volume. We compare the case where algorithms enable traders to implement this strategy to that where traders can only place orders when they have completed their information processing task.

We study the allocation and compensation of human capital in the U.S. finance industry over the past century. Across time, space, and subsectors, we find that financial deregulation is associated with skill intensity, job complexity, and high wages for finance employees. All three measures are high before 1940 and after 1985, but not in the interim period. Workers in finance earn the same education-adjusted wages as other workers until 1990, but by 2006 the premium is 50% on average. Top executive compensation in finance follows the same pattern and timing, where the premium reaches 250%. Similar results hold for other top earners in finance. Changes in earnings risk can explain about one half of the increase in the average premium; changes in the size distribution of firms can explain about one fifth of the premium for executives.

NBER Working Paper Series - National Bureau of Economic Research, n° 12030/2006; This paper investigates the efficiency of household investment decisions in a unique dataset containing the disaggregated wealth and income of the entire population of Sweden. The analysis focuses on two main sources of inefficiency in the financial portfolio: underdiversification of risky assets ("down") and nonparticipation in risky asset markets ("out"). We find that while a few households are very poorly diversified, the cost of diversification mistakes is quite modest for most of the population. For instance, a majority of participating Swedish households are sufficiently diversified internationally to outperform the Sharpe ratio of their domestic stock market. We document that households with greater financial sophistication tend to invest more efficiently but also more aggressively, so the welfare cost of portfolio inefficiency tends to be greater for these households. The welfare cost of nonparticipation is smaller by almost one half when we take account of the fact that nonparticipants would be unlikely to invest efficiently if they participated in risky asset markets.

International audience; We study the relation between the ownership structure of financial assets and non-fundamental risk. We define an asset to be fragile if it is susceptible to non-fundamental shifts in demand. An asset can be fragile because of concentrated ownership, or because its owners face correlated or volatile liquidity shocks, i.e., they must buy or sell at the same time. We formalize this idea and apply it to mutual fund ownership of US stocks. Consistent with our predictions, fragility strongly predicts price volatility. We then extend the logic of fragility to investigate two natural extensions: (1) the forecast of stock return comovement and (2) the potentially destabilizing impact of arbitrageurs on stock prices.

This paper examines the relationship between cross-country differences in drug price regulation and the location of biopharmaceutical Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Europe. Simple theory predicts that price regulation in one country might affect total investment, but not the location of that investment, if sales are global. Nevertheless, some manufacturers threaten that the introduction of price regulation in a country will motivate them to move their investments to other countries. Are such threats cheap talk, or is there evidence that firms avoid price-controlling countries when making FDI location choices? We use data on 527 investments initiated in 27 European countries between 2002 and 2009 and find that investors are less likely to choose countries with price controls, after controlling for other determinants of investment. We also observe a relative decline in investment in countries that increased the stringency of regulatory regimes during our sample period. The effect is restricted to non-manufacturing investments and is most robust for those related to administrative functions.

Existing estimates of power laws in firm size typically ignore the impact of international trade. Using a simple theoretical framework, we show that international trade systematically affects the distribution of firm size: the power law exponent among exporting firms should be strictly lower in absolute value than the power law exponent among non-exporting firms. We use a dataset of French firms to demonstrate that this prediction is strongly supported by the data, both for the economy as a whole and at the industry level. Furthermore, the differences between power law coefficients for exporters and non-exporters are larger in sectors that are more open to trade. While estimates of power law exponents have been used to pin down parameters in theoretical and quantitative models, our analysis implies that the existing estimates are systematically lower than the true values. We propose two simple ways of estimating power law parameters that take explicit account of exporting behavior.

We present a model of the optimal level of international reserves for a small open economy seeking insurance against sudden stops in capital flows. We derive a formula for the optimal level of reserves and show that plausible calibrations can explain reserves of the order of magnitude observed in many emerging market countries. The buildup of reserves in emerging market Asia can be explained only if one assumes a large anticipated output cost of sudden stops and a high level of risk aversion.

NBER Working Paper Series - National Bureau of Economic Research, n° 11441/2004; Recent research documents that aggregate stock prices are driven by shocks with persistence levels ranging from daily intervals to several decades. Building on these insights, we introduce a parsimonious equilibrium model in which regime-shifts of heterogeneous durations affect the volatility of dividend news. We estimate tightly parameterized specifications with up to 256 discrete states on daily U.S. equity returns. The multifrequency equilibrium has significantly higher likelihood than the classic Campbell and Hentschel (1992) specification, while generating volatility feedback effects 6 to 12 times larger. We show in an extension that Bayesian learning about stochastic volatility is faster for bad states than good states, providing a novel source of endogenous skewness that complements the "uncertainty" channel considered in previous literature (e.g., Veronesi, 1999). Furthermore, signal precision induces a tradeoff between skewness and kurtosis, and economies with intermediate investor information best match the data.

International audience; A substantial part of international differences in prices of individual products, both goods and services, can be explained by differences in per capita income, wage compression, or low wage dispersion among low-wage workers, and exchange rate fluctuations. Higher per capita income is associated with higher prices and higher wage dispersion with lower prices. The effects of higher income and wage dispersion are moderated for the more tradable products. The effects of wage dispersion, on the other hand, are magnified for the more labor-intensive products, particularly low-skill services. The differences in prices across countries are reflected in differences in the composition of consumption. Countries in which prices of labor-intensive services are very high, such as the Nordic countries, consume much less of them. For some services, the shares of GDP consumed in high-price countries are less than 20% of the shares in low-price countries. Since these are services of very low tradability, the low consumption levels of these services imply low employment in them.

We examine deal-level data from 395 private equity transactions in Western Europe initiated by large private equity houses during the period 1991 to 2007. We un-lever the deal-level equity return and adjust for un-levered return to quoted peers to extract a measure of abnormal performance of the deal. The abnormal performance is significantly positive on average, and stays positive in periods with low sector returns. In the cross-section of deals, higher abnormal performance is related to greater growth in sales and greater improvement in EBITDA to sales ratio (margin) during the private phase, relative to those of quoted peers. Finally, we show that general partners with an operational background (ex-consultants or ex-industry-managers) generate significantly higher outperformance in organic deals that focus exclusively on internal value creation programs; in contrast, general partners with a background in finance (ex-bankers or ex-accountants) generate higher outperformance in deals with significant M&A events. We interpret these findings as evidence, on average, of positive, but heterogeneous skills at deal partner level in private equity transactions.

This paper examines the relationship bewteen cross-country differences in drug price regulation and the location of biopharmaceutical Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Europe. We use a theoretically-grounded location-choice model and data on 294 investments initiated in 27 European countries between 2002 and 2006 to test the hypothesis that biopharmaceutical companies are less likely to locate new investments in countries with more stringent price regulation., Dans cet article nous examinons la relation entre les différences de réglementations de santé entre pays en matière de prix des médicaments et les stratégies de localisation des firmes pharmaceutiques. Nous utilisons un modèle de choix de localisation et des données sur 294 investissements directs à l'étranger réalisés entre 2002 et 2006 dans 27 pays européens. Les différences de politique de santé entre pays mais aussi les changements de politique au sein de certains pays nous permettent d'estimer si les firmes pharmaceutiques tendent à choisir des pays où les contraintes réglementaires sont plus faibles.

Countries that have experienced occasional financial crises have, on average, grown faster than countries with stable financial conditions. Because financial crises are realizations of downside risk, we measure their incidence by the skewness of credit growth. Unlike variance, negative skewness isolates the impact of the large, infrequent, and abrupt credit busts associated with crises. We find a robust negative link between skewness and GDP growth in a large sample of countries over 1960-2000. This suggests a positive effect of systemic risk on growth. To explain this finding, we present a model in which contract enforceability problems generate borrowing constraints and impede growth. In financially liberalized economies with moderate contract enforceability, systemic risk taking is encouraged and increases investment. This leads to higher mean growth but also to greater incidence of crises. In the data, the link between skewness and growth is indeed strongest in such economies.

Publicado por New York: Sociedad para la Economía dinamíca. 2004. UC3M Working paper. 65 Since World War II there has been: (i) a rise in the fraction of time that married households allocate to market work, (ii) an increase in the rate of divorce, and (iii) a decline in the rate of marriage. What can explain this? It is argued here that technological progress in the household sector has saved on the need for labor at home. This makes it more feasible for singles to maintain their own home, and for married women to work. To address this question, a search model of marriage and divorce is developed. Household production benefits from labor-saving technological progress.

We show that the size of the public debt, the budget deficit and the monetary overhang made it impossible for France to stabilize its price level and return to the pre-war parity immediately after World War I, even on the anti-keynesian assumption that a stabilization would not have had any negative effects on real income. The reason for the immediate postwar inflation then was not mismanaged policy but a wise choice in the French context. Nevertheless, a stabilization at a devalued franc which would have been substantially higher than the rate achieved by Poincar‚‚ in 1926 was historically possible in early 1924, and it would likely have benefited not only France but the entire international monetary system.

We present a new empirical decomposition of the effects of financial liberalization on economic growth and on the incidence of crises. Our empirical estimates show that the direct effect of financial liberalization on growth by far outweighs the indirect effect via a higher propensity to crisis. We also discuss several models of financial liberalization and growth whose predictions are consistent with our empirical findings.

Foreign exchange reserve accumulation has risen dramatically in recent years. The introduction of the euro, greater liquidity in other major currencies, and the rising current account deficits and external debt of the United States have increased the pressure on central banks to diversify away from the US dollar. A major portfolio shift would significantly affect exchange rates and the status of the dollar as the dominant international currency. We develop a dynamic mean-variance optimization framework with portfolio rebalancing costs to estimate optimal portfolio weights among the main international currencies. Making various assumptions on expected currency returns and the variance-covariance structure, we assess how the euro has changed this allocation. We then perform simulations for the optimal currency allocations of four large emerging market countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), adding constraints that reflect a central bank's desire to hold a sizable portion of its portfolio in the currencies of its peg, its foreign debt and its international trade. Our main results are: (i) The optimizer can match the large share of the US dollar in reserves, when the dollar is the reference (risk-free) currency. (ii) The optimum portfolios show a much lower weight for the euro than is observed. This suggests that the euro may already enjoy an enhanced role as an international reserve currency ("punching above its weight"). (iii) Growth in issuance of euro-denominated securities, a rise in euro zone trade with key emerging markets, and increased use of the euro as a currency peg, would all work towards raising the optimal euro shares, with the last factor being quantitatively the most important. J. Japanese Int. Economies20 (4) (2006) 508-547.

This paper offers empirical evidence that real exchange rate volatility can have a significant impact on the long-term rate of productivity growth, but the effect depends critically on a country's level of financial development. For countries with relatively low levels of financial development, exchange rate volatility generally reduces growth, whereas for financially advanced countries, there is no significant effect. Our empirical analysis is based on an 83 country data set spanning the years 1960-2000; our results appear robust to time window, alternative measures of financial development and exchange rate volatility, and outliers. We also offer a simple monetary growth model in which real exchange rate uncertainty exacerbates the negative investment effects of domestic credit market constraints. Our approach delivers results that are in striking contrast to the vast existing empirical exchange rate literature, which largely finds the effects of exchange rate volatility on real activity to be relatively small and insignificant.

NBER Working Paper Series - National Bureau of Economic Research, n° 9764/2003; We introduce a neoclassical growth economy with idiosyncratic production risk and incomplete markets. Each agent is an entrepreneur operating her own neoclassical technology with her own capital stock. The general equilibrium is characterized in closed form. Idiosyncratic production shocks introduce a risk premium on private equity and reduce the demand for investment. The steady state is characterized by a lower capital stock due to entrepreneurial risk and a lower interest rate due to precautionary savings as compared to complete markets. The private equity premium is endogenously countercyclical: the anticipation of low savings and high interest rates in the future feed back to high risk premia and low investment in the present. Countercyclicality in risk taking slows down convergence to the steady state and amplifies the magnitude and persistence of the business cycle. These results, which contrast sharply with those obtained in Bewley models, highlight the macroeconomic significance of missing markets in production and investment risk.

International audience; We confirm the presence of substantial nonlinearities in real exchange rate dynamics at the sectoral level. There exists zones where arbitrage is not profitable because of transaction costs, and thus mean reversion is inexistent. We compute the speed of mean reversion of sector specific real exchange rates, conditional on the existence of arbitrage as implied by our nonlinear estimations, and relate them to plausible economic determinants such as tradability and exchange rate volatility.

Diffusion du document : INRA Unité d'Economie et Sociologie rurales 4 Allée Adolphe Bobierre CS 61103 35011 Rennes cedex (FRA); Le partage optimal de pertes liées à la survenance d'un événement catastrophique est analysé au sein d'un pool de marché créé par des assureurs. L'auteur examine en particulier la situation extrême dans laquelle la capacité financière du pool est insuffisante pour indemniser l'ensemble des pertes assurées ; le pool se trouve alors en état d'insolvabilité. Il exclut le recours à l’État en tant que réassureur en dernier ressort. Les deux principes fondamentaux de partage des risques (i.e., le principe de mutualité et le partage des risques non diversifiables) sont reconsidérés en présence de cette menace d'insolvabilité. Il montre que ces résultats restent valides pour un sous-ensemble d'assureurs acceptant de rester dans le pool après la survenance d'une catastrophe. Dans le contexte du marché de l'assurance, cette situation d'insolvabilité peut résulter d'un refus des assurés de payer une surprime excédant leur indemnité initiale suite à la survenance d'une catastrophe. Ce risque de défaut de paiement ne permet pas un partage optimal des risques du premier rang qui procurerait une couverture complète avec une prime d'assurance variable dépendant des pertes agrégées. L'optimum du second rang est alors caractérisé. Il consiste en une couverture complète au-delà d'une franchise variable ; cette dernière est déterminée de façon à égaliser la somme des indemnités versées et la capacité financière du pool. Ce schéma d'assurance contraste avec celui prévu dans les pools de marché existants où, en cas d'insolvabilité, les indemnités sont calculées au pro-rata des capitaux disponibles. L'auteur montre que ce schéma d'assurance novateur, incluant une franchise variable, permet de proposer de nouvelles formes de partage de risques afin de repousser les limites de l'assurabilité des risques lorsque toutes les solutions alternatives de financement proposées par les marchés financiers ont été épuisées.