This paper offers additional evidence on the structure of the international financial network as emerging from the Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS) dataset collected by the IMF. Making use of blockmodeling techniques which allow us to fit a given community partition to real data,...

This paper employs panel techniques to empirically examine the link between the competitiveness of the banking sector and real economic growth, using data from a sample of OECD economies during 1997-2010. We employ a dynamic GMM model to find that an increase in the efficiency of banks driven by...

This paper develops a macroeconomic model of real-financial market interactions in which the credit and the business cycles reinforce each other according to a bidirectional causal relationship. We do so in the context of a computational agent-based framework, where the channelling of funds from...

The run-up in oil prices since 2004 coincided with growing investment in commodity markets and increased price comovement among different commodities. We assess whether speculation in the oil market played a role in driving this salient empirical pattern. We identify oil shocks from a large...

We expect a firm's competitive advantage to manifest itself in a return on invested capital that is higher than the opportunity cost of capital. Deviations of returns from the cost of capital are a signal for competitive entry or for exit, while the speed of convergence indicates the strength of...