We address the importance of external versus domestic conditions in determining emerging market bond (EMBI) spreads. Using principal components, we derive a measure of global risk aversion, which is shown to have a significant and, when interacted with a country's foreign debt to GNI ratio,...

Compte tenu des disparités actuelles de taux de croissance relatifs et de soldes des paiements courants entre économies de l’OCDE, l’incidence des réformes structurelles sur les déséquilibres extérieurs est un thème qui suscite beaucoup d’intérêt. Les responsables de la politique...

The impact of structural reforms on external imbalances has attracted considerable attention in view of the existing constellation of relative growth rates and current account balances among OECD economies. Not least among policy makers, what should and can be done to help solve the problem has...

The health of a firm’s balance sheet potentially plays a role in its decisions to invest and through that channel, aggregate activity can be affected. Several authors have established a theoretical link based on the notion that the value of equity can be collateralised for business loans used...

Between 2002 and early 2005 risk premia for a number of asset classes across broad geographical areas not only fell substantially but also tended to move more closely together than they had done historically. This raises the question to what extent this apparent reduced investor discrimination...

In the vast majority of OECD economies, house prices in real terms have been moving up strongly since the mid-1990s. Because of the important role housing wealth has been playing during the current upswing, this paper will look more closely at what is underlying these developments for 18 OECD...

In this paper policy issues related to the operation of monetary policy in a low inflation environment are discussed. The successful reduction of inflation rates in a number of OECD countries in recent years arguably represents a regime shift that is likely to affect the operation of monetary...

For a long time European Economic and Monetary Union was mainly considered an internal European issue and external consequences were largely ignored. In contrast to most previous analyses, this paper looks at a number of international implications of monetary union. It is argued that several...

This paper assesses the extent to which the fall in risk premia of a number of financial assets, which occurred throughout 2003, was due to improvements in factors specific to individual markets at that time or to general economic fundamentals coupled with OECD-wide abundant liquidity. Regarding...

This paper analyses the major changes in both monetary and fiscal policy that have taken place over the past two decades and, within the limits of the existing empirical research, evaluates the overall costs and benefits for the OECD economies. The general findings for monetary policy are that,...