We analyze the international transmission of financial stress and its effects on economic activity. We construct country specific monthly financial stress indexes (FSI) using dynamic factor models from 1970 until 2012 for 20 countries. We show that there is a strong co-movement of the FSI during...

Using structural VARs, I find that external shocks are an important source of macroeconomic fluctuations in emerging markets. Furthermore, U.S. monetary policy shocks affect quickly and strongly interest rates and the exchange rate in a typical emerging market. The price level and real output in...

To analyze the international transmission of business cycle fluctuations, we propose a new multilevel dynamic factor model with a block structure that (i) does not restrict the factors to being orthogonal and (ii) mixes data sampled at quarterly and monthly frequencies. By means of Monte Carlo...

This paper explores the transmission of non-capital shocks through banking networks. We develop a methodology to construct non-capital (idiosyncratic) shocks, using labor productivity shocks to large firms. We document a change in the relationship between foreign idiosyncratic shocks and...

The "great recession" has affected labor markets in Euro-area countries in very different ways. This chapter documents two important aspects of their response: the impact effect of the recession on the rate of unemployment, and the persistence of high unemployment. We find that countries lie on...

Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves may be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple...

Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves may be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple...

An impulse response function is derived for a vector autogressive model with a multivariate GARCH-in-Mean process. The multivariate GARCH volatility speci cation is based on Tsiaplias and Chua (2009) and accommodates both direct and indirect volatility spillovers. The impulse response function...

This paper adumbrates a theory of what might be going wrong in the monetary SVAR literature and provides supporting empirical evidence. The theory is that macroeconomists may be attempting to identify structural forms that do not exist, given the true distribution of the innovations in the...