The debate on the benefits of financial integration is revisited in a two-country neoclassical growth model with aggregate uncertainty. Gains from more efficient capital allocation and gains from risk sharing are accounted for simultaneously|together with their interaction. Global numerical...

I review The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King, published by W.W. Norton and Company in 2016. I discuss King's proposed regulatory reform, the ‘Pawn Broker for All Seasons' (PFAS) and I compare it to an alternative solution developed in my own work. I argue that unregulated trade in the financial...

We propose a simple measure of de facto financial market integration based on a factor model of monthly equity returns, which can be computed back to the first era of financial globalization for 17 countries. Global financial market integration follows a “swoosh” shape – i.e. high...

I characterize the optimal financial regulation policy in an economy where financial intermediaries trade capital assets on behalf of households, but must retain an equity stake to align incentives. Financial regulation is necessary because intermediaries cannot be excluded from privately...

This paper studies a quantitative general equilibriummodel of the housing market where a large number of overlapping generations of homeowners face both idiosyncratic and aggregate risks but have limited opportunities to insure against these risks due to incomplete financial markets and...

Research on leverage and asset-price fluctuations focuses on the direct effect of lax bank lending enabling financially-constrained investors to take excessive risks. Ignored are unconstrained investors speculating on higher prices during credit booms. To identify these two effects, we utilize...

There are concerns that the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) has impeded small business lending. By increasing the fixed regulatory compliance requirements needed to make business loans and operate a bank, the DFA disproportionately reduced the incentives for all banks to make very modest loans and reduced...

The global financial crisis of 2008 was followed by a wave of regulatory reforms that affected large banks, especially those with a global presence. These reforms were reactive to the crisis.In this paper we propose a structural model of global banking that can be used proactively to perform...

Over the past twenty years, especially the past decade, China has taken enormous strides to develop its bond market as an integral step of financial reform. This paper aims to provide the most up-to-date overview of Chinese bond markets, by highlighting two distinct and largely segmented...

When countries liberalize their stock markets, firms that become eligible for purchase by foreigners (investible), experience an average stock price revaluation of 10.4 percent. Since the covariance of the median investible firm's stock return with the local market is 30 times larger than its...