The difference between actual borrowings and borrowing limits alone generates information asymmetry in the credit card market. This information asymmetry can make the market incomplete and create ex post misallocations. Households that are denied credit could well turn out to be ex post less...

Over the past few years, the ability of the United States to finance its current account deficit has been facilitated by massive purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds and agency securities by Asian central banks. In this process, Asian central banks have accumulated large stockpiles of U.S.-dollar...

Pricing-to-market (PTM) theory suggests that monopolistic firms which export adjust their destination-specific markups in reaction to exchange rate shocks. These adjustments limit changes in the price of their exports. Thus, important movements in the bilateral nominal exchange rate between two...

The author describes results obtained by using a new methodology to estimate potential output for the United Kingdom. The estimation method, which follows Rennison (2003) and Gosselin and Lalonde (2002), shows that combining the use of a Hodrick-Prescott filter and a structural vector...

Model risk is a constant danger for financial economists using interest-rate forecasts for the purposes of monetary policy analysis, portfolio allocations, or risk-management decisions. Use of multiple models does not necessarily solve the problem as it greatly increases the work required and...

The debate on the order of integration of interest rates has long focused on the I(1) versus I(0) distinction. In this paper, we use instead the wavelet OLS estimator of Jensen (1999) to estimate the fractional integration parameters of several interest rates for the United States and Canada...

The authors develop a new methodology to investigate how crises cause the relationship between financial variables to change. Two possible sources of increased co-movement between markets during high-variance episodes are considered: larger common shocks operating through standard market...

We present a new matrix-logarithm model of the realized covariance matrix of stock returns. The model uses latent factors which are functions of both lagged volatility and returns. The model has several advantages: it is parsimonious; it does not require imposing parameter restrictions; and, it...

Using a panel logit framework, the paper provides an estimate of the likelihood of a house price correction in 18 OECD countries. The analysis shows that a simple measure of the degree of house price overvaluation contains a lot of information about subsequent price reversals. Corrections are...