While the positive return differential of the United States has attracted a lot of attention in the literature, the factors underlying the dynamics of the investment income balance have so far not been systematically investigated. Here, we propose a novel decomposition framework that accounts...

This paper studies net foreign assets and the differential returns between gross foreign assets and liabilities for a sample of 49 countries between 1981 and 2007. It shows that investment income is more important than capital gains in imparting a drift to net foreign assets over the long-run,...

The dominance of the U.S. dollar in the global financial system remains the key pillar of international trade and monetary stability but faces growing challenges in a rapidly changing world. Historically rooted in the Bretton Woods system and the establishment of the petrodollar system, the...

This dissertation was written by Christopher Weber during his time as a research assistant at the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich. It was handed in at the department of Economics at the LMU Munich in July 2016. The goal of the thesis is to...

We examine the relationship between private bank deposits and macro/fiscal risk in the euro area. We test three hypotheses: First, private bank deposits relative to Germany are determined by macro/fiscal risk factors. Second, this relationship is time-varying. Third, time-variation is driven by...

This paper develops composite indicators of financial integration within the euro area for both price-based and quantity-based indicators covering money, bond, equity and banking markets. Prior to aggregation, individual integration indicators are harmonised by applying the probability integral...

Using a DSGE model with nominal wage rigidity, we investigate two scenarios for the Italian economy. The first considers sustained policy commitment to reform. The results indicate the possibility of ‘growing out of bad initial conditions’, if fiscal consolidation is combined with a program...

We examine the relationship between private bank deposits and macro/fiscal risk in the euro area. We test three hypotheses: First, private bank deposits relative to Germany are determined by macro/fiscal risk factors. Second, this relationship is time-varying. Third, time-variation is driven by...

This paper criticises the standard methodology used to measure the importance of different channels of risk sharing in federal states such as the one used in Asdrubali et al.'s (1996) seminal contribution. It argues that the methodology chosen in these papers systematically underestimates the...

We study the role of international financial integration in buffering natural disaster shocks, using a large sample of advanced and emerging economies. Conditioning on such exogenous events addresses the endogeneity between financial structures and economic conditions. We document that...