Many countries provide unemployment insurance (UI) to reduce individuals' income risk and to moderate fluctuations in the economy. However, to the extent that these policies are successful, they would be expected to reduce precautionary savings and hence bank deposits--households' main saving...

Most of the international macro models, in contrast to the data, imply a very high level of risk sharing across countries and very low real exchange rate (RER) volatility relative to output. In this paper we show that a standard two-country two-good model augmented with conintegrated TFP...