Germany’s social contract, its “social market economy” for the past seven decades, has aimed at spreading wealth and providing a broad social safety net for all groups of society. Yet a defining feature of Germany’s new economy has been the sharp increase in inequality.

The causes of the 2008 collapse and subsequent surge in global capital flows remain an open and highly controversial issue. Employing a factor model coupled with a dataset of high-frequency portfolio capital flows to 50 economies, the paper finds that common shocks - key crisis events as well as...

Is there a pecking order of cross-border investment in that countries become financially integrated primarily through some types of investment rather than others? Using a novel database of bilateral capital stocks for all types of investment – FDI, portfolio equity securities, debt securities...

We show that international consumption risk sharing is significantly improved by capital flows, especially portfolio investment. Concomitantly, we show that poor institutions hamper risk sharing, but to an extent that decreases with openness. In particular, risk sharing is prevalent even among...

The paper analyses the heterogeneity in the link between macroeconomic fundamentals and exchange rates. For a set of important US-specific economic shocks, it shows that such shocks have exerted a remarkably heterogeneous effect on global exchange rate configurations over the past 25 years....