A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to efficient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with relative consumptions across countries. This paper shows that a model with incomplete markets and a low price elasticity of imports...

Sylvain Leduc notes that the extent of international risk-sharing remains surprisingly small. This appears to be the case even though the development of international financial markets should better equip households to pool their resources so that their level of consumption varies less from year...

Covariance matrix forecasts of financial asset returns are an important component of current practice in financial risk management. A wide variety of models, ranging from matrices of simple summary measures to covariance matrices implied from option prices, are available for generating such...

Under the strong-form of market discipline, publicly traded banks that have constantly available public market signals from their stock (and bond) prices would take less risk than non-publicly traded banks because counterparties, borrowers, and regulators could react to adverse public market...

This paper examines the properties of X-inefficiencies in U.S. banking firms. We find that, after controlling for scale differences, the average small size banking firm is less efficient than the aerate large firm. Smaller firms also exhibit higher variation in X-inefficiencies than their larger...

One reason why countries service their external debts is the fear that default might lead to shrinkage of international trade. If so, then creditors should systematically lend more to countries with which they share closer trade links. We develop a simple theoretical model to capture this...