It has been argued that the global financial crisis 2007–2009 was intrinsically related to two largely unprecedented phenomena in the global economy: (i) exceptionally benign financial market conditions as mirrored in historically low risk premia and buoyant asset price developments as well as...

<heading id="h1" level="1" format="display" implicit="no">Abstract</heading> Since the mid-1990s and prior to the financial crisis external balances of systemically important economies widened significantly. This paper takes a long-run perspective and reviews the main determinants of widening global imbalances. To this aim, we first provide a set of newly...

In this paper, we take a systematic look at global imbalances. First, we provide a definition of the phenomenon, and relate global imbalances to widening external positions of systemically important economies that reflect distortions or entail risks for the global economy. Second, we provide an...

Global financial integration unlocks a huge potential for international risk sharing. We examine the degree to which international equity holdings act as a risk sharing device in industrial and emerging economies. We split equity returns into investment income (dividend distribution) and capital...

Capital flows into the euro area were particularly large in the mid-2000s and the share of foreign holdings of euro area securities increased substantially between the introduction of the euro and the outbreak of the global financial crisis. We show that the increase in foreign holdings of euro...

This paper argues that global perspective can help us with the identification of structural shocks by utilizing the information on the signs of the responses of individual countries (cross section units). We demonstrate the main idea by means of Monte Carlo experiments and present an empirical...