This paper investigates welfare gains and channels of risk sharing among 14 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, including the oil-rich Gulf region and the resource-scarce economies such as Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. The results show that, for the 1992--2009 period, the overall...

We examine the impact of the global financial crisis on the degree of international income and consumption risk-sharing among industrial economies using returns on cross-border portfolio holdings (e.g., debt, equity, fdi). We split the returns from the net foreign holdings as receipts (inflows)...

We examine the spillover effects of local and global shocks on Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-wide sector equity returns. We find the GCC-wide sector returns have asynchronous responses to global and regional shocks. Although the effects of these shocks differ in magnitude across individual...

This study investigates the return spillovers and volatility spillovers from developed markets (e.g., Europe, Japan and the US) into the financial markets of selected emerging countries in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Based on constant and trend spillover models, we...

Following the launch of the Euro in 1999, integration among Euro area financial markets increased considerably. As a result, portfolio home bias declined across the European financial markets. However, greater market integration has generated a new bias: portfolio Euro bias, a situation where...

We document that the net factor income smoothing channel in OECD countries is primarily driven by net financial asset income, while the other two sub-components (net compensation of employees, net taxes on imports) turn out to be ineffective. Once factor income inflows are distinguished from...

This paper incorporates recent developments in the literature to quantify the amount of interprovincial risk-sharing in Canada. We find that 29% of shocks to gross provincial product are smoothed by capital markets, 27% are smoothed by the federal tax-transfer systems, and about 24% are smoothed...

In the years before the global financial crisis of 2008--2010, Qatar experienced a huge build-up of liquidity surplus in the banking system, mainly driven by surging net capital inflows. This paper identifies various sources of interbank liquidity in Qatar and discusses the various implications...

Using Qatar as a case study, we exploit a novel micro dataset for 102 raw agricultural imported commodities on a shipment-by-shipment basis over the period January 1, 2005 to June 30, 2010. The data comprise over half a million individual observations, with a very rich set of characteristic...

Import-dependent arid Arab micro states such as those in the Persian Gulf are particularly vulnerable to food-security risk. Among the many remedial policy suggestions is some initiation or increase in domestic production to insulate these countries from supply disruption, import price...