We study the synchronization of credit booms and busts among 12 major European economies and the United States between 1972-2011. We propose a regression-based procedure to test whether boom-bust phases of credit cycles coincide across countries and to cluster countries with positively...

We investigate how the relative contribution of external factors to stock price movements varies with the degree of financial development. We find that financial development makes stock markets more susceptible to external influences (both financial and macroeconomic). Interestingly, this effect...

The financial crises of the late 1990s in Asian and South American countries have once again highlighted the negative implications of development strategies characterized by high levels of foreign currency external indebtedness. In light of these events, South-South cooperation is conceived as...

I examine whether or not returns on stock markets are a leading indicator for real macroeconomic developments in Austria, Japan and the USA. Further I deal with the concept of stock market efficiency, the question whether or not information from real and financial sectors of the economy is...

The extent to which the stock market provides a hedge to investors against inflation is examined for African stock markets. By employing parametric and nonparametric cointegration procedures, we show that the point estimates of the elasticities of stock prices with respect to consumer prices...

We apply the Diebold-Yilmaz connectedness index methodology on sovereign credit default swaps (SCDSs) to estimate the network structure of global sovereign credit risk. In particular, using the elastic net estimation method, we separately estimate networks of daily SCDS returns and volatilities...

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of carry trade strategies during and after the financial crisis using a flexible approach to modeling currency returns. We decompose the currency returns into multiplicative sign and absolute return components, which exhibit much greater predictability...

Since the global financial crisis, major central banks gradually switched to unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) as part of their efforts to directly influence the long-term interest rates. This study analyzes the impact of conventional/unconventional monetary policies on sovereign bond...

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...

This paper is an empirical study of Asian stock volatility using stochastic volatility factor (SVF) model of Cipollini and Kapetanios (2005). We adopt their approach to carry out factor analysis and to forecast volatility. Our results show some Asian factors exhibit long memory that is in line...