May 14, 2015
F - International Economics
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May 14, 2015
The Slowdown in Global Trade
Global trade growth has been weak during the period following the 2007–09 financial crisis. This is an important development for Canada, given the Canadian economy's high degree of openness to trade. This article investigates some of the factors behind the slowdown in global trade and finds that the weakness of global demand and its changing composition, increased protectionism and diminishing incentives to expand trade have all played a role. Some of these factors are likely to have only a temporary effect on trade growth, but others could be more long-lasting. -
A Wake-Up-Call Theory of Contagion
We propose a novel theory of financial contagion. We study global coordination games of regime change in two regions with an initially uncertain correlation of regional fundamentals. -
Euro Area Government Bonds—Integration and Fragmentation During the Sovereign Debt Crisis
The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting the heteroskedasticity of intraday changes in bond yields for identification. -
Sluggish Exports in Advanced Economies: How Much Is Due to Demand?
Exports in advanced economies have been relatively sluggish since 2011, growing at a much slower pace than observed before the global financial crisis. -
What Drives Bank-Intermediated Trade Finance? Evidence from Cross-Country Analysis
Empirical work on the underlying causes of the recent dislocations in bank-intermediated trade finance has been limited by the poor availability of hard data. This paper analyzes the key determinants of bank-intermediated trade finance using a novel data set covering ten banking jurisdictions. -
A New Data Set of Quarterly Total Factor Productivity in the Canadian Business Sector
In this paper, a quarterly growth-accounting data set is built for the Canadian business sector with the top-down approach of Diewert and Yu (2012). Inputs and outputs are measured and used to estimate the quarterly total factor productivity (TFP). -
Motivations for Capital Controls and Their Effectiveness
We assess the motivations for changing capital controls and their effectiveness in India, a country with extensive and long-standing controls. We focus on the controls on foreign borrowing that can, in principle, be motivated by macroprudential concerns. -
Does Financial Integration Increase Welfare? Evidence from International Household-Level Data
Despite a vast empirical literature that assesses the impact of financial integration on the economy, evidence of substantial welfare gains from consumption risk sharing remains elusive. While maintaining the usual cross-country perspective of the literature, this paper explicitly accounts for household heterogeneity and thus relaxes three restrictive assumptions that have featured prominently in the past. -
International Spillovers of Large-Scale Asset Purchases
This paper evaluates the international spillover effects of large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) using a two-country dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with nominal and real rigidities, and portfolio balance effects.