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This paper surveys the literature on the linkages between asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes. It focuses on three major questions. First, what are the basic theoretical linkages between asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes? Second, what is the empirical evidence supporting these linkages? And third, what are the main challenges to the theoretical and empirical findings? The survey addresses these questions in the context of four major asset price categories: equity prices, house prices, exchange rates and interest rates, with a particular focus on their international dimensions. It also puts into perspective the evolution of the literature on the determinants of asset prices and their linkages with macroeconomic outcomes, and discusses possible future research directions.

This volume was prepared by Inga Heiland while she was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in July 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It comprises five chapters addressing one or more aspects of international trade and factor movements, including trade in goods, trade in value added, international movement of labor and capital, and trade in risk. All chapters aim to contribute to our understanding of the economic gains from globalization in its various forms. Thereby, they touch more or less explicitly on the issues of the determinants of the pattern of trade, factor flows, and production, as well as the role of barriers to the international exchange of goods and factors. From a methodological point of view, all chapters share a strong emphasis on general equilibrium analysis, and those chapters that are accompanied by an empirical analysis rely primarily on structural estimation.

In the immediate wake of the Great Recession we didn't see the disinflation that most models predicted and, subsequently, we didn't see the inflation they predicted. We show that these puzzles disappear in a Vector Autoregressive model that properly accounts for domestic and global factors. Such a model reveals, among others, that domestic factors explain much of the inflation dynamics in the 2012-2014 euro area missing inflation episode. Consequently, economists and models that excessively focused on the global nature of inflation were liable to miss the contribution of deflationary domestic shocks during this episode.

Returns on LBOs are on average higher for developed economies. However, returns of LBOs during high economic growth periods are high for developing economies relative to developed economies. Onthe other hand returns in developing nations are lower when compared to the returns in developed nations in periods of negative economic growth. Developing countries are more unstable relative to developedcountries during conditions of boom as well as collapse. Exit times for LBO transactions in developing economies are therefore shorter relative to developed economies in periods of high positive (negative) economic growth rate. During periods of negative economic growth rate, LBOs in developing economies exit sooner. In periodsof low or medium economic growth, LBOs in developing economies take longer to exit. Reputed firms and small firms have higher returns and exit sooner. Club deals have higher returns and exit sooner whencompared with single PE firm deals. Club deals in developing economies are on average not profitable and exit sooner

This study attempts to find the appropriate exchange rate regime for economic structure of Pakistan. To this end the study uses ARDL bond testing approach to estimate long run and for the estimation of short run analysis Error correction model (ECM) is applied. Time series data is used over the period from 1984 to 2012. Findings reveal that Trade openness, foreign exchange reserves, and inflation rate are important determinant while choosing appropriate exchange-rate regime for economy having features like Pakistan. On the basis of analysis, this study suggests that both extreme ends hard peg and free float are unfavorable for it. The results also survive during robustness check. However, caution is required while making a policy decision as clear-cut answer is absent. Nonetheless, choice of regime is a difficult task in empirical analysis because few factors cannot explain actual regime.Keywords. Exchange Rate Regime, Classification, ARDL.JEL. F31, F33, F44.

Mobilizing financial resources to cover investment needs is a concern of all countries, developed or developing ones, of consolidated market economies or emerging ones. A distinctive characteristic of Global Economy over the last few decades has been the rising rate and impressive increase in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The purpose of this research is to analyse global FDI inflows in Europe and in Romania. The results of the research support the idea that the balance of economic power is changing in the world economy and the countries that own a stable and solid industrial base are at an advantage. The new trends determined by the economic crisis in the field of FDI refer to the growing percentage of developing and emerging countries in the global flows of FDI.

Commodity prices are characterized by boom and bust cycles. In this article, the impact of the commodity boom of the 2000s on Latin American and Caribbean economies is studied by analyzing four categories of commodity exports (agricultural raw materials, fuel, food, ore and minerals) as well as manufactured exports. Latin American and Caribbean economies had higher growth during the 2000s than in the period before the commodities boom. This study examines whether the higher growth was explained by the commodity boom, and if so, which of the different export commodities accounted for this higher growth. The findings should be relevant to understanding the effects on economic growth of a possible bust in commodity prices. The results show that ore and mineral exports, fuel exports and food exports generally had a negative effect on GDP per capita growth but ore and mineral exports had a positive effect on LAC countries during the boom. During the boom period, agricultural exports had negative effects, especially for LAC countries. Fuel exports had a positive effect on LAC and non-LAC countries during the boom. Manufacturing exports in general had a positive effect on economic growth, but in the boom period this effect almost disappeared for the LAC countries.

© 2016 Elsevier B.V. This paper investigates the global macroeconomic consequences of country-specific oil-supply shocks. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop a model for the global oil market and integrate this within a compact quarterly model of the global economy to illustrate how our multi-country approach to modeling oil markets can be used to identify country-specific oil-supply shocks. On the empirical side, estimating the GVAR-Oil model for 27 countries/regions over the period 1979Q2 to 2013Q1, we show that the global economic implications of oil-supply shocks (due to, for instance, sanctions, wars, or natural disasters) vary considerably depending on which country is subject to the shock. In particular, we find that adverse shocks to Iranian oil output are neutralized in terms of their effects on the global economy (real outputs and financial markets) mainly due to an increase in Saudi Arabian oil production. In contrast, a negative shock to oil supply in Saudi Arabia leads to an immediate and permanent increase in oil prices, given that the loss in Saudi Arabian production is not compensated for by the other oil producers. As a result, a Saudi Arabian oil supply shock has significant adverse effects for the global economy with real GDP falling in both advanced and emerging economies, and large losses in real equity prices worldwide.

In this paper we revisit the methodological aspects of the issue of spurious cycles: using the well-established clinometric data, we apply an empirical strategy to identify spurious periodicities and cross-validate the results. The analysis of cyclical fluctuations involves numerous challenges, including data preparation and detrending. As a result, there is a risk of statistical artifacts to arise: it is known that summation operators and filtering yield a red noise alike spectral signature, amplifying lower frequencies and thus, longer periodicity, whereas detrending using differencing yields a blue noise alike spectral signature, amplifying higher frequencies and thus, shorter periodicity. In our paper we explicitly address this issue. In order to derive the stationary signals to be tested, we perform outlier adjustment, derive cycles from the series with the asymmetric band pass Christiano-Fitzgerald filter using the upper bands of the Kuznets and the Juglar cycles as cut-offs, and obtain detrended prefiltered signals by differencing the series in the absence of fractional integration. Afterwards, we simultaneously test whether the spectral densities of filtered and detrended prefiltered signals are significantly different from the spectral density of the related noise. The periodicities from the Kuznets range were not simultaneously significant, and thus are likely to be spurious; whereas ones of the Juglar and Kitchin ranges were simultaneously significant. The simultaneous significance test helps to identify spurious periodicities and the results, in general, accord with the durations of the business cycles found in other works.

In the global recession of 2009, exports declined precipitously in many countries. We illustrate with firm-level data for Belgium and Peru that the decline was very sudden and almost entirely due to lower export sales by existing exporters. After the recession, exports rebounded almost equally quickly and we evaluate whether export promotion programs were an effective tool aiding this recovery. We show that firms taking advantage of this type of support did better during the crisis, controlling flexibly for systematic differences between supported and control firms. The primary mechanism we identify is that supported firms are generally more likely to survive on the export market and, in particular, are more likely to continue exporting to countries hit by the financial crisis.

The present study aims to determine the common trends and the permanent and transitory components of remittances received by Mexican households. This is done by estimating a small Dynamic Factor Model (DFM), using the approach first proposed by Gonzalo and Granger (1995), determining the number of common trends subject to the cointegration results. The study also shows the similarities between this small DFM with respect to large DFM, which are widely used in the econometric literature. The results indicate the presence of one cointegration relationship. Consequently, there are four common trends. These common factors are negatively dominated by Mexico's economic activity and positively by the U.S. industrial production. The effects of the exchange rate and the U.S. unemployment rate are positive, but less relevant. This economic scenario leads to remittances exceeding its permanent component

A Computable General Equilibrium model is used to analyze commodity price shocks in an abundant natural resource country framework (Bolivia), with two export oriented resource sectors (natural gas & oil and minerals) and mainly two emerging tradable sectors (food and manufacturing) with dominant import substitution orientation. The objective is to study how the structure of the Bolivian economy changed in a period of high international resource prices and anticipate how that economic structure should adjust in a new period of low international resource prices. Under what conditions will de boom reverse? Is Bolivia Prepared?

This paper provides an introduction to the business cycle. In the capitalist economy there are fluctuations in economic activity which apply to all aspects of socio-economic development. Capitalist economy is growing at a variable rate. These regular changes in economic activity are called cyclical or economic fluctuations. Business cycles as we know them today were first identified and analyzed by Arthur Burns and Wesley Mitchell in their 1946 book, Measuring Business Cycles (Romer, 2008): 'Business cycles are a type of fluctuation found in the aggregate economic activity of nations that organize their work mainly in business enterprises: a cycle consists of expansions occurring at about the same time in many economic activities, followed by similarly general recessions, contractions, and revivals which merge into the expansion phase of the next cycle'(Burns, Mitchell, 1946, s. 5).

As an important global and regional economic power, the PRC's growth slowdown may cause large spillover effects to its neighboring economies. Using a multi-sectoral global computable general equilibrium model, this paper quantitatively investigates the impacts of a growth slowdown in the PRC for emerging Asian economies through trade linkages. The results suggest that a growth slowdown of 1.6 percentage points in the PRC would bring about a growth deceleration of 0.26 percentage points in developing Asia as a whole. However, the impacts vary dramatically by economy within developing Asia, reflecting their difference in economic and trade structure.

The recent plunge in oil prices has brought into question the generally accepted view that lower oil prices are good for the US and the global economy. In this paper, using a quarterly multi-country econometric model, we first show that a fall in oil prices tends relatively quickly to lower interest rates and inflation in most countries, and increase global real equity prices. The effects on real output are positive, although they take longer to materialize (around 4 quarters after the shock). We then re-examine the effects of low oil prices on the US economy over different sub-periods using monthly observations on real oil prices, real equity prices and real dividends. We confirm the perverse positive relationship between oil and equity prices over the period since the 2008 financial crisis highlighted in the recent literature, but show that this relationship has been unstable when considered over the longer time period of 1946.2016. In contrast, we find a stable negative relationship between oil prices and real dividends which we argue is a better proxy for economic activity (as compared to equity prices). On the supply side, the effects of lower oil prices differ widely across the different oil producers, and could be perverse initially, as some of the major oil producers try to compensate their loss of revenues by raising production. Taking demand and supply adjustments to oil price changes as a whole, we conclude that oil markets equilibrate but rather slowly, with large episodic swings between low and high oil prices., global oil markets

We propose a fully flexible, complete-market model of the international business cycle that is consistent with two major empirical facts: positive cross-country co-movement of economic aggregates and a negative correlation between the real exchange rate and relative consumption (the Backus-Smith puzzle). The novelty of our paper is twofold. First, we allow for imperfect substitutability of capital which significantly reinforces Harrold-Balassa-Samuelson effects, producing more empirically relevant movements in real exchange rates. Second, we introduce changes in expectations (news-shocks) as an explanation to the Backus-Smith puzzle through movements in relative hours across countries, while being consistent with expectations-driven economic expansions.

Domestic prudential regulation can have unintended effects across borders and may be less effective in an environment where banks operate globally. Using U.S. micro-banking data for the first quarter of 2000 through the third quarter of 2013, this study shows that some regulatory changes indeed spill over. First, a foreign country's tightening of limits on loan-to-value ratios and local currency reserve requirements increase lending growth in the United States through the U.S. branches and subsidiaries of foreign banks. Second, a foreign tightening of capital requirements shifts lending by U.S. global banks away from the country where the tightening occurs to the United States and to other countries. Third, tighter U.S. capital regulation reduces lending by large U.S. global banks to foreign residents.

I identify new patterns in countries' economic performance over the 2007-2014 period based on proximity through distance, trade, and finance to the US subprime mortgage and Eurozone debt crisis areas. To understand the causes of the cross-country variation, I develop an open economy model with two transmission channels that can be shocked separately: international trade and finance. The model is the first to include a government and heterogeneous firms that can default independently of one another and has a novel endogenous cost of sovereign default. I calibrate the model to the average experiences of countries near to and far from the crisis areas. Using these calibrations, disturbances on the order of those observed during the late 2000s are separately applied to each channel to study transmission. The results suggest credit disruption as the primary contagion driver, rather than the trade channel. Given the substantial degree of financial contagion, I run a series of counterfactuals studying the efficacy of capital controls and find that they would be a useful tool for preventing similarly severe contagion in the future, so long as there is not capital immobility to the degree that the local sovereign can default without suffering capital flight.

All explorations of the future of the Euro show serious risks for its survival in the present form. The road map of the Five EU Presidents presented in 2015 is far from sufficient to reduce the risks of the Euro zone falling apart by Brexit type developments or new economic shocks. The EU Presidents rely too much on high international economic growth smoothing the convergence in labor productivity between EU member states, while the more likely low growth scenario shows a serious risk of the Euro-area falling apart in a chaotic way, through further divergence in labor productivity, through new Banking crises or through the popular vote in response to fiscal and labor market reform. The Presidents argue for strengthening the Banking union with an independent watchdog, with a single resolution mechanism for Bank defaults and for a European credit deposit insurance system. The support for these proposals is overwhelming. They also argue for more transfer of sovereignty on financial policy and for debt mutualisation (sharing of the risks of country debt among all EU countries). This is unlikely to happen, while at the same time the urgency for dealing with the drag imposed by the high debt levels of many EU countries on economic growth is high. We propose that the EU negotiates a New Deal between the highly indebted Euro countries and the other Euro countries. In this deal the trust is built that the richer countries agree on debt mutualization against the assurance of an automatic exit from the Euro area at non-compliance with the agreed (and simplified) rules.

Motivated by the increased importance of trade between industrialized and less-developed countries, we build a DSGE model featuring comparative advantage and inter-industry trade to analyze business cycle dynamics of industrialized countries. We show that productivity shocks lead to shifts in the relative demand of exporting and import-competing sectors, implying an important role for the mobility of workers across sectors. If workers are very mobile, then the aggregate implications of the two-sector model are similar to a one-sector model. If workers are very immobile, then the two-sector model features smaller responses in GDP to domestic shocks but larger responses to foreign shocks, implying larger comovement of GDP across countries.

We investigate the presence of international business cycles in macroeconomic aggregates (output, consumption, investment) using a panel of 60 countries over the period 1961 - 2014. The paper presents a Bayesian stochastic factor selection approach for dynamic factor models with predetermined factors. The literature has so far ignored model uncertainty in these models as common factors (i.e., global, regional or otherwise) are typically imposed but not tested for. We focus in particular on the existence of a global business cycle as the literature has, in our opinion unjustifiably, taken for granted its existence. In contrast to the literature, we find no evidence to support its presence.

This paper investigates whether credit constraints in the US economy amplify the international propagation of US financial shocks. We model the dynamics of the US economy jointly with global macroeconomic and financial variables using a threshold vector autoregression. This model captures regime-specific dynamics conditional on the severity of credit constraints in the US economy. We identify three main episodes of tight credit in US financial history over the past thirty years. These occur in the late-1980s, in the early 2000s, and during the 2007-09 financial crisis. We find that US financial shocks are associated with a significant contraction in global economic activity in times of tight credit. By contrast, there is little impact of US financial shocks on the global economy in normal times. This asymmetry highlights an international dimension of the US financial accelerator mechanism.

Capital flow and commodity cycles have long been connected with economic crises. Sparse historical data, however, has made it difficult to connect their timing. We date turning points in global capital flows and commodity prices across two centuries and provide estimates from alternative data sources. We then document a strong overlap between the ebb and flow of financial capital, the commodity price super-cycle, and sovereign defaults since 1815. The results have implications for today, as many emerging markets are facing a double bust in capital inflows and commodity prices, making them vulnerable to crises.

This paper identifies anticipated (news) and unanticipated (surprise) shocks to the U.S. Fed Funds rate using CBOT Fed Funds Future Market and assesses their propagation to emerging economies. Anticipated movements account for 80% of quarterly Fed Funds fluctuations and explain a significant fraction of the narrative monetary policy shocks. An expected 1% increase in the reference interest rate induces a fall of 2% in GDP of emerging economies two quarters before the shock materializes. Unanticipated contractionary shocks also cause a recession. Both shocks have a larger impact in emerging relative to developed economies and the financial channel is the most relevant for their transmission. Anticipation is also relevant to understand the transmission of U.S. real interest rate shocks.

We add agency costs as in Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997) into a two-country, two-good international business-cycle model. In our model, changes in the relative price of investment arise endogenously. Despite the fact that technology shocks are uncorrelated across countries, the relative price of investment is positively correlated across countries in our model, much as it is in detrended U.S./euro area data. We also find that the financial frictions tend to increase the volatility of the terms of trade and the international correlations of consumption, hours worked, output and investment. We then compare this model to an alternative model that also includes risk shocks à la Christiano, Motto and Rostango (2014). We use credit spread data (for the United States) to calibrate the AR(1) process for risk shocks. We find that risk shocks are too small to significantly impact the model’s dynamics., Dans un modèle de cycle économique à deux pays et à deux biens, nous intégrons des coûts de délégation à la manière de Carlstrom et Fuerst (1997). Dans notre modèle, les variations du prix relatif de l’investissement sont endogènes. Malgré l’absence de corrélation entre les chocs technologiques spécifiques aux pays, les prix relatifs de l’investissement sont positivement corrélés dans les deux pays, à l’instar de ce que l’on observe pour le couple États-Unis-zone euro dans les données dépouillées de leur composante tendancielle. Nous constatons également que les frictions financières ont tendance à accroître la volatilité des termes de l’échange et les corrélations de la consommation, des heures travaillées, de la production et de l’investissement entre pays. Nous comparons ensuite les résultats obtenus à ceux d’une variante du modèle dans laquelle sont incorporés des chocs de risque à la manière de Christiano, Motto et Rostango (2014). Nous employons des données relatives aux écarts de crédit aux États-Unis pour calibrer un processus autorégressif d’ordre 1 pour les chocs de risque. Il ressort de notre analyse que l’ampleur des chocs de risque est trop faible pour exercer une influence notable sur la dynamique du modèle.

Cycles in the behavior of stock markets have been widely documented. There is an increasing body of literature on whether stock markets anticipate business cycles or its turning points. Several recent studies assert that financial integration impacts positively on business cycle comovements of economies. We consider three Western equity markets, represented by their respective stock indices: DJIA (USA), FTSE 100 (UK), and Euro Stoxx 50 (euro area). Connecting these three markets together via vector autoregressive processes in index returns, we construct "propagation values" to measure and trace, on a daily basis, the relative importance of a market as a volatility creator within the network, where volatility is due to a return shock in a market. A cross-wavelet analysis reveals the joint frequency structure of pairs of the propagation value series, in particular whether or not two series tend to move in the same direction at a given frequency. Our main findings are: (i) From 2001 onwards, the daily propagation values of markets have been fluctuating much less than before, and high frequencies have become less pronounced; (ii) the European markets are in phase at business cycle frequency, while the US market is not in phase with either European market; (iii) in 2008, the euro area has taken over the leading role. This approach not only provides new insight into the time-dependent interplay of equity markets, but it can also replicate certain findings of traditional business cycle research, and it has the advantage of using only readily available stock market data.

This paper examines the behavior of remittances over the business cycle and their potential to act as a stabilizer during periods of high business cycle volatility. Four main findings are reported. First, in theory, the cyclical behavior of remittances depends on the motives to remit. Second, remittances are less volatile than other foreign currency flows but do not appear to systemically co-move with business cycle fluctuations. Third, remittances are relatively stable even during episodes of sharp business cycle volatility, such as those associated with sudden stops and financial crises. Finally, remittances can help support consumption stability over the business cycle.

The Phillips curve, which posits a relationship between inflation and domestic economic activity, introduces a crucial trade-off between real and nominal objectives for the central bank. Atkeson and Ohanian (2001), among others, present evidence that forecasts of U.S. inflation from Phillips curve-based models tend to underperform relative to naïve forecasts. We propose that globalization can be an important factor in explaining the poor performance of forecasts under a closed-economy Phillips curve. To illustrate that, we empirically evaluate the performance of open-economy Phillips curve-based forecasts constructed with global variables, such as G7 credit growth, G7 money supply growth, terms of trade, and the real effective exchange rate. These global variables perform significantly better than domestic variables, and serve as proxies for poorly-measured indicators of global slack. Moreover, we show that forecasts using simulated data from a workhorse open-economy New Keynesian model support our empirical findings on the open economy Phillips curve and also suggest that better monetary policy and aspects of the Great Moderation have improved the forecast accuracy of open-economy models.

Using a factor structural VAR for 14 countries out of the G20 group, we document that output innovations originating outside the G7 account for shares of 10 to 25 percent in the business cycle fluctuations of G7 GDP growth. Using auxiliary regressions, we additionally find that these innovations contribute noticeably, relative to G7 output innovations, to short-term fluctuations in important other national G7 variables such as employment, the current account balance, inflation, and inflation volatility, and in global macroeconomic indicators like the oil price, world stock market returns, and exchange rate volatility. The results indicate that in a globalized world spillovers from emerging markets and industrial countries other than the G7 play a relevant role for major aspects of the G7 and world business cycle.

Using a novel data set for 17 countries dating from 1900 to 2013, we characterize business cycles in both small developed and developing countries in a model with financial frictions and a common shock structure. We estimate the model jointly for these 17 countries using Bayesian methods. We find that financial frictions are an important feature for not only developing countries but also small developed countries. Furthermore, business cycles in both groups of countries are marked with trend productivity shocks. Common disturbances explain one-third of the fluctuations in small, open economies (both developed and developing), especially during important worldwide phenomena., Grâce à un nouvel ensemble de données sur 17 pays couvrant la période de 1900 à 2013, nous caractérisons les cycles économiques de petits pays développés et de pays en développement dans un modèle doté de frictions financières et d’une structure de chocs commune. Nous estimons le modèle pour les 17 pays collectivement en recourant à des méthodes bayésiennes. Nous constatons que les frictions financières constituent une caractéristique importante non seulement des pays en développement, mais aussi des petits pays développés. Par ailleurs, les cycles économiques des deux groupes de pays sont marqués par des chocs de productivité tendancielle. Les perturbations communes expliquent le tiers des fluctuations dans les petites économies ouvertes (qu’il s’agisse de pays développés ou de pays en développement), en particulier durant des phénomènes mondiaux importants.

Empirical studies support the hysteresis hypothesis that recessions have a permanent effect on the level of output. We analyze the implications of hysteresis for fiscal policy in a DSGE model. We assume a simple learning-by-doing mechanism where demand-driven changes in employment can affect the level of productivity permanently, leading to hysteresis in output. We show that the fiscal output multiplier is much larger in the presence of hysteresis and that the welfare multiplier of fiscal policy - the consumption equivalent change in welfare for one dollar change in public spending - is positive (negative) in the presence (absence) of hysteresis. The main bene.t of accommodative fiscal policy in the presence of hysteresis is to diminish the damage of a recession to the long-term level of productivity and, thus, output.

Business cycle synchronization represents a condition for the successful implementation of the common monetary policy within the Economic and Monetary Union. There is a tight relation between business cycle synchronization and the economic convergence of the Member States of the Monetary Union. Investigating the specialized literature, this study analyses below the factors which influence the synchronization of the economic fluctuations of the economies in the Euro area. A second objective of this study is represented by the pointing out of the evolution of the synchronization process of the business cycle after the adoption of the euro, in the euro area countries by reference to the empiric evidence. The hypothesis of the study states that the introduction of the unique currency in 1999 resulted into the increase of the synchronization degree of the business cycle.

Motivated by debates surrounding international capital flows during the Great Recession, we conduct a positive and normative analysis of capital flows when a region of the global economy experiences a liquidity trap. Capital flows reduce inefficient output fluctuations in this region by inducing exchange rate movements that reallocate expenditure towards the goods it produces. Restricting capital mobility hampers such an adjustment. From a global perspective, constrained efficiency entails subsidizing capital flows to address an aggregate demand externality associated with exchange rate movements. Absent cooperation, however, dynamic terms-of-trade manipulation motives drive countries to inefficiently restrict capital flows, impeding aggregate demand stabilization., This version: September 7, 2017 (original version December 17, 2015), Cette version: 7 septembre 2017 (version originale : 17 décembre 2015)

Die politische und wirtschaftliche Integration Europas, besonders auch die gemeinsame Währung, haben die Verflechtung der Finanzmärkte wesentlich vorangetrieben. Mit der zunehmenden Diversifizierung von Beteiligungskapital wurde die internationale Konsumglättung gefördert. Dies lässt sich aus dem Einfluss des Home-Bias auf die Transmission von nationalen Schocks des Bruttoinlandsprodukts (BIP) auf den Inlandskonsum ablesen. Insbesondere die aus Aktienbesitz erzielbaren Renditen lassen sich durch eine internationale Ausrichtung des Portfolios glätten, während dieser Aspekt bei Schuldverschreibungen weniger ins Gewicht fällt. Auch in der aktuellen Finanzkrise wurden divergierende Entwicklungen der nationalen Wertschöpfung durch internationale Risikoteilung teilweise ausgeglichen. Zugleich wurde jedoch die wechselseitige Abhängigkeit der EU-Länder offenkundig und mit ihr die Notwendigkeit einer effektiven europäischen Finanzaufsicht. Europe's political and economic integration and especially the single European currency have significantly advanced the interconnectedness of the financial markets. The increasing diversification of equity capital within and outside the euro area, in particular, has contributed to international consumption smoothing. This can be seen from the effect of the home bias on the transmission of national shocks of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on domestic consumption. Especially, returns on equity holdings can be smoothed by giving the portfolio an international focus, while this option is limited for debt securities. Actually, divergent developments in national value added during the current financial crisis have partly been compensated. At the same time, however, interdependencies between EU member states also became apparent and so the necessity of an effective European financial supervision.

This study examines the development of the US economy since the prolonged recession in the early 1980s. This period was characterised by a serious weakening in the bargaining position of waged workers and a major expansion of the financial sector. Most of the economic gains accrued to top earners and economic growth became increasingly dependent on the expansion of credit. This precarious constellation led to short recessions in 1990 and again in 2001, but then in 2007 and 2008 the failure of highly complex securities led to the most serious financial crisis since 1929. The study reviews the development of profitability, income distribution and other key macroeconomic variables in the period leading up to, during and immediately after the crisis. It then identifies the main channels by which the crisis was transmitted form the US to other advanced capitalist economies and concludes with a brief review of the policy measures introduced by the US government in response to the crisis.

We show that a model with imperfectly forecastable changes in future productivity and an occasionally binding collateral constraint can match a set of stylized facts about "sudden stop" events. "Good" news about future productivity raises leverage during times of expansion, increasing the probability that the constraint binds, and a sudden stop occurs, in future periods. The economy exhibits a boom period in the run-up to the sudden stop, with output, consumption, and investment all above trend, consistent with the data. During the sudden stop, the nonlinear effects of the constraint induce output, consumption, and investment to fall substantially below trend, as they do in the data.

Emerging market economies (also known as emerging economies, EEs) have become important on the world economic stage, where they now play a vital role in international trade and financial flows and account for a conspicuous fraction of the global economic dynamic. Despite the relatively tepid economic growth of advanced economies (AEs) from 2004 to 2007, the growth of EEs continued to be strong during that same period. This behaviour provided some evidence for the so-called 'decoupling hypothesis' that EEs have, over time, become less dependent on AEs. With the recent global financial crisis, the direction of the debate on the 'decoupling' has been partially changed; thus, the discussion remains unresolved. The decoupling hypothesis implies two main consequences. First, the comovement of economic cycles between AEs and EEs should decrease over time. Second, the resilience of the EEs to adverse scenarios in AEs should increase through time. This work sought to identify empirical evidences of the two consequences of decoupling. Two approaches were employed: 1) the Euclidean distance was used to evaluate the correlation of the international economic cycles, and 2) a time-varying Panel VAR model was used to decompose fluctuations in GDP into global, regional, group and country specific components and quantify the time path of the resilience of EEs. Although the Euclidean distance does not provide a clear indication in favour of decoupling, if we consider a sufficiently lengthy time period what does emerge, albeit subject to certain geographical differences, is that the connection between EEs and EAs has changed in that EEs are more resilient to the adverse scenarios that may arise in AEs. This result lends support to the decoupling hypothesis, although it is also clear that the process of strengthening of the EEs, that is, the decoupling process, has not emerged in a gradual, progressive manner, but has, on the contrary, followed a more complex dynamic characterised by 'alternate phases'. This discontinuity over time, together with the geographical peculiarities of the phenomenon, is still to be fully understood.

This paper proposes a novel approach, based on probit framework, towards measuring business cycle synchronization for 9 eurozone economies. We find strong cross-country synchronization in both business cycles and financial cycles. Moreover, financial synchronization dominates business cycle synchronization in the eurozone, especially after the introduction of the single currency. For some peripheral country pairs, we even find some evidence of "de-coupling" business cycles relative to the core countries but the majority of marginal business cycle effects do not change much over time. The former observation supports the often heard plea for more Europe-wide macro-prudential regulation whereas the latter observation gives ammunition to those economists that always stressed that the euro zone architecture is unfinished business and that the conditions for an optimum currency area are not fulfilled.

We investigate whether frictions in US financial markets amplify the international propagation of US financial shocks. The dynamics of the US economy is modeled jointly with global macroeconomic and financial variables using a threshold vector autoregression that allows us to capture regime-dependent dynamics conditional on the tightness of US credit market conditions, measured by the excess bond premium on US corporate bonds. The US economy switches from a regime of unconstrained access to credit to one characterized by tight credit whenever the bond risk premium exceeds a critical threshold. US financial shocks have an insignificant effect on the global economy when borrowers have unconstrained access to credit. On the contrary, US financial shocks give rise to a worldwide economic contraction in the tight credit regime. Moreover, US financial shocks are a relatively more important driver of US and global business cycles in times of tight credit.

This paper first compares house price cycles in advanced and emerging economies using a new quarterly house price dataset covering the period 1990- 2012. It is found that that house prices in emerging economies grow faster, are more volatile, less persistent and less synchronized across countries than in advanced economies. They also correlate more closely with capital flows than in advanced economies. The analysis is then conditioned on an exogenous change to global liquidity, broadly understood as a proxy for the international supply of credit. It is found that in emerging markets a global liquidity shock has a much stronger impact on house prices and consumption than in advanced economies. Finally, holding house prices constant in response to this shock tends to dampen its effects on consumption in both advanced and emerging economies, but possibly through different channels: in advanced economies by boosting the value of housing collateral and hence supporting domestic borrowing, and in emerging markets by appreciating the exchange rate and hence supporting the international borrowing capacity of the economy.

In this paper, we examine the evolution of intra-East Asian financial integration from 2001 to 2013. Most existing studies on this topic look primarily at asset holdings; we examine liability holdings as well. Using the International Monetary Fund's Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey data for equities, long-term debt, and short-term debt, our analysis generally supports the conventional wisdom that East Asian countries are more financially integrated with global financial centers than they are with each other. This is true for both asset holdings and liabilities and is confirmed by an econometric analysis based on financial gravity equations. However, the gap between global integration and regional integration has narrowed for asset holdings over time but not for liability holdings. The results of additional econometric analysis indicate that the diversification of liability holdings can mitigate financial instability due to global financial shocks. More precisely, diversification was associated with smaller exchange rate depreciation during the quantitative easing taper tantrum of 2013. These results point to a possible benefit from strengthening regional financial integration. Deeper regional integration would reduce dependence on global financial markets for funding and hence vulnerability to global shocks.

This study readdresses the determinants of business cycle synchronisation. We test, on the one hand, whether FDI promoting policies may have consequences for the business cycle comovement between countries, and on the other hand, whether more plausi- ble identification strategies change previous results. Our results suggest that linkages through foreign direct investment contribute in most cases positively to the synchroni- sation between country pairs. In contrast, the beneficial effects of trade integration for the similarity of business cycles are less robust and thus less important for the trans- mission of idiosyncratic shocks between countries than previously thought. Finally, we find that larger differences in the sector structure between two economies result in a bigger gap between their business cycles.

The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 spread through different channels from its origin in the United States to large parts of the world. In this paper we explore the financial and the trade channels in a unified framework and quantify their relative importance for this transmission. Specifically, we employ a DSGE model of an open economy with an internationally operating banking sector. We investigate the transmission of the crisis via the collapse of export demand and through losses in the value of cross-border asset holdings. Calibrated to German and UK data, the model attributes around half of the observed maximum output decline in Germany to these channels, and 87% for the UK. While the trade channel explains 30% of the empirical output decline in both countries, the financial channel plays a much larger role in the UK than in Germany. The UK's larger vulnerability to financial shocks is due to higher foreign-asset holdings, which simultaneously serve as an automatic stabilizer in case of plummeting foreign demand. The transmission via the financial channel triggers a much longer-lasting recession relative to the trade channel, resulting in larger cumulated output losses and a prolonged crisis particularly in the UK. Stricter bank capital regulations would have deepened the initial slump while simultaneously speeding up the recovery.

Using 25 years of military spending data from more than a hundred countries, this paper provides new evidence on the effect of government spending on output. Following a popular assumption that military spending is unlikely to respond to output at business-cycle frequencies - and exploiting variation in military spending of a significantly larger magnitude than in the previous literature based on U.S. data - we find that the pooled government spending multiplier is small: below 0.2. This estimate, however, masks substantial heterogeneity: the debtfinanced spending multiplier is larger and can be well above 1 if monetary policy is accommodative. The multiplier is especially large in recessions and when the government purchases durables. We also document substantial heterogeneity across countries with the spending multiplier larger in advanced economies and in countries with a fixed exchange rate. The output response to government spending persists for about two to three years. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of fiscal policy depends largely on the economic environment, policy implementation, and the central bank's response, and that the small multipliers found in historical or pooled data are a poor guide to evaluating the effectiveness of a specific stimulus program.

Long-term interest rates in a number of small-open inflation targeting economies co-move more strongly with US long-term rates than with short-term rates in those economies. We augment a standard small open-economy model with imperfectly substitutable government bonds and time-varying term premia that captures this phenomenon. The estimated model fits a range of US and UK data remarkably well, and produces term premium estimates that are comparable to estimates from the affine term structure model literature. We find that the strong co-movement between US and UK long-term interest rates arises primarily via correlated policy rate expectations, rather than through correlated term premia. This is due to policymakers in both economies responding to foreign productivity and discount factor shocks that cause persistent changes in inflation. We also overcome the common failure of similar models to account for the large influence of foreign disturbances on domestic economies found empirically, where in our model around 40% of the variation in UK GDP can be explained by shocks originating in the US economy.