Country practices towards managing financial risks on a sovereign balance sheet continue to evolve. Each crisis period, and its legacy on sovereign balance sheets, reaffirms the need for strengthening financial risk management. This paper discusses some salient features embedded in in the...

In most macroeconomic models, the substitutability between domestic and foreign goods is calibrated using aggregated data. This imposes homogeneous elasticities across goods, and the calibration is only valid under this assumption. If elasticities are heterogeneous, the aggregate...

This paper develops a theory of international currency portfolios that holds in general equilibrium, and that is therefore not subject to the criticisms directed at the portfolio balance literature of the 1980s. It shows that, under plausible assumptions about fiscal policy, the relationship...

Long-term investors face a common problem-how to maintain the purchasing power of their assets over time and achieve a level of real returns consistent with their investment objectives. While inflation-linked bonds and derivatives have been developed to hedge the effects of inflation, their...

We study a banking model in which banks invest in a riskless asset and compete in both deposit and risky loan markets. The model predicts that as competition increases, both loans and assets increase; however, the effect on the loans-to-assets ratio is ambiguous. Similarly, as competition...

Recent events have shown that sovereigns, just like banks, can be subject to runs, highlighting the importance of the investor base for their liabilities. This paper proposes a methodology for compiling internationally comparable estimates of investor holdings of sovereign debt. Based on this...

Intro -- Contents -- I. Introduction -- II. Household Data on Wealth and Consumption -- III. Capital Markets in Europe and Household Portfolios -- IV. The Life-Cycle Model of Consumption -- V. The Basic Model -- VI. Empirical Results -- VII. Conclusion -- Appendix: Data and Constructed Variables...

Intro -- Contents -- I. Introduction -- II. Habit Formation in Household Portfolios -- III. The Model: Multiperiod Multinomial Probit with Autocorrelated Errors and Unobserved Heterogeneity -- IV. Empirical Results -- V. Conclusion -- Appendix: Data and Statistics -- References.

This paper develops a general equilibrium model with unemployment and noncooperative wage determination to analyze the importance of incomplete markets when risk-averse agents are subject to idiosyncratic employment shocks. A version of the model calibrated to the U.S. shows that market...

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. EXPLAINING DIFFERENCES IN INCOME -- III. EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS -- IV. RESULTS -- V. IMPLICATIONS AND DISCUSSION -- VI. CAVEATS -- VII. CONCLUSIONS -- REFERENCES.