How does sovereign risk affect investors' behavior? We answer this question using a novel database that combines sovereign default probabilities for 27 developed and emerging markets with monthly data on the portfolios of individual bond mutual funds. We first show that changes in yields do not...

A large number of measures for monitoring risk and uncertainty surrounding macroeconomic and financial outcomes have been proposed in the literature, and these measures are frequently used by market participants, policy makers, and researchers in their analyses. However, risk and uncertainty...

This paper tests for predictability of output growth in a panel of 22 emerging market economies. We use pooled panel data methods that control for endogeneity and persistence in the predictor variables to test the predictive power of a large set of financial aggregates. Results show that stock...

Bad contagion, the downside component of contagion in international stock markets, has negative implications for financial stability. I propose a measure for the occurrence and severity of global contagion that combines the factor-model approach in Bekaert et al. (2005) with the model-free or...

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...

We show that a model where investors learn about the persistence of oil-price movements accounts well for the fluctuations in oil-price futures since the late 1990s. Using a DSGE model, we then show that this learning process alters the impact of oil shocks, making it time-dependent and...