This paper investigates whether risk sharing, measured as income and consumption smoothing, among countries in the EU and the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has increased since the adoption of the euro. We ask: Have the recent increase in foreign equity and debt holdings been...

We estimate the effects of deregulation of U.S. banking restrictions on the amount of interstate personal income insurance during the period 1970-2001. Interstate income insurance occurs when personal income reacts less than one-to-one to state-specific shocks to output. We find that income...

This paper examines the properties of alternative GMM procedures for estimation of the log-normal stochastic autoregessive volatility model through a large scale Monte Carlo study. We demonstrate that there is a fundamental trade-off between the number of moments, or information, included in the...

We examine the empirical role of different explanations for the lack of flows of capital from rich to poor countries the quot;Lucas Paradox.quot; The theoretical explanations include differences in fundamentals across countries and capital market imperfections. We show that during 1970-2000 low...

We investigate the relationship between foreign direct ownership of firms and firm- and region-level output volatility using a novel panel data set for European countries. We document a positive, highly robust, relationship between firm-level foreign ownership and volatility of value added. This...

We present new stylized facts on bank and firm leverage during the period 2000–2009 using internationally comparable micro level data from many countries. We document the following patterns: a) there was an increase in leverage for investment banks prior to the sub-prime crisis; b) there was...