The large and persistent deviations of nominal exchange rates from their purchasing power parities comprise a key stylized fact in international economics. This paper sheds light on these persistent deviations by combining two disparate strands of empirical work. The first strand focuses on real...

The volatility of financial markets has been a relevant topic for transition economies, as the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have seemingly endured high levels of volatility in their financial sectors during the transition process. But what have been the...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks' lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms' credit constraints at two...

We document recent developments in the use of sterilisation bonds by six central banks in emerging Asia, and discuss the implications for monetary policy and the financial sector. An important development in the sterilisation of foreign exchange interventions in past years has been the frequent...

This paper introduces the "Excessive Liquidity Creation Hypothesis," whereby a rise in a bank's core liquidity creation activity increases its probability of failure. Russia experienced many bank failures over the past decade, making it an ideal natural field experiment for testing this...

We analyze business cycle convergence in the EU by focusing on the decoupling vs. convergence hypothesis for central, eastern and south eastern Europe (CESEE). In a nutshell, we find that business cycles in CESEE have decoupled considerably from the euro area (EA) during the financial crisis in...

We empirically test the dependence of the Russian stock market on the world stock market and world oil prices in the period 1997:10-2012:02. We also consider three Eastern European stock markets (Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary), as well as two markets outside Europe (Turkey and South...

This paper examines past evidence of prolonged periods of reserve accumulation in Asian emerging market economies and the direct and indirect implications for monetary stability through the potential impact of such episodes on financial stability. The empirical research focuses on identifying...

We examine the effects of political connections on depositor discipline in a sample of Turkish banks. Banks with former members of parliament at the helm enjoy reduced depositor discipline, especially if the former politician's party is currently in power - less so if the former politician...