Search Results
Journal Article
Commercial bank lending data during the crisis: handle with care
Caution is necessary when making inferences based solely on aggregate loans data.
Working Paper
The cyclical properties of disaggregated capital flows
We describe the second-moment properties of the components of international capital flows and their relationship (covariance and correlation) to business cycle variables of 22 emerging and OECD countries. Disaggregated flows have different volatility properties, with debt being the most volatile and FDI the least volatile. We show that (a) inward flows are procyclical, outward and net outward flows are countercyclical for most industrial and emerging countries while, for the G-7, both inward and outward flows are procyclical and net outflows are countercyclical; (b) inward FDI flows are ...
Working Paper
Do European capital flows comove?
We study the cross-sectional correlations of net, total, and disaggregated capital flows for the major source and recipient European Union countries. We seek evidence of changes in these correlations since the introduction of the euro to understand whether the European Union can be considered a unique entity with regard to its international capital flows. We first use Ng's (2006) "uniform spacing" methodology to rank cross-sectional correlations (i.e., which flows comove more) and to shed light on potential common factors driving international equity flows. We find that a common factor ...
Working Paper
U.S. commercial bank lending through 2008:Q4: new evidence from gross credit flows
How have U.S. commercial banks responded during the current financial crisis? What was hiding behind the dynamics of aggregate commercial bank loans through the end of 2008? We use balance sheet data for the entire population of commercial banks to construct quarterly gross credit flows (credit expansion and credit contraction series) for the U.S. banking system during the period 1999:Q1-2008:Q4 and provide new evidence on changes in lending. We show that credit expansion, as defined in this paper, began declining during the first half of 2008 while credit contraction began steeply increasing ...
Working Paper
Changes in the second-moment properties of disaggregated capital flows
Using formal statistical tests, we detect (i) significant volatility increases for various types of capital flows for a period of changes in business cycle comovement among the G7 countries, and (ii) mixed evidence of changes in covariances and correlations with a set of macroeconomic variables.
Working Paper
The (non-)resiliency of foreign direct investment in the United States during the 2007-2009 financial crisis
We study the contraction of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows in the United States during the recent financial crisis and show their unusual non-resiliency, which depends in part on the global nature of the economic recession, but also on the increases in the cost of financing FDI in the economies in which the flows originate. To formally study the effects of external financial conditions on FDI in the United States, we exploit the three dimensions of a panel of U.S. inward FDI flows organized by recipient U.S. industries, source countries, and years for the recorded flows. Changes in the ...
Working Paper
International trade, female labor, and entrepreneurship in MENA countries
Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries stand out in international comparisons of de jure obstacles to female employment and entrepreneurship. These obstacles are mirrored in low female labor rate participation and low entrepreneurship and ownership rates. Recent research suggests a connection between international trade and female labor participation. In this article, the authors focus on the relationship between international trade and gender in the MENA countries first analyzing female labor as a production factor, and then focusing on female entrepreneurship and firm ownership. ...
Working Paper
What do we know about the relationship between access to finance and international trade?
In part as a response to the recent financial crisis, the relationship between access to finance and international trade has received much attention in the recent years. This article reviews trade finance, its role and functioning. It discusses the relevance of the more general concept of access to credit for firms engaging in international trade both in normal times and during times credit may be scarcer because of a banking and financial crisis. Part of the paper focuses on the evidence from the recent episode of the Great Trade Collapse, and argues that the mixed empirical evidence is at ...
Working Paper
How did the financial crisis alter the correlations of U.S. yield spreads?
We investigate the pairwise correlations of 11 U.S. fixed income yield spreads over a sample that includes the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. Using cross-sectional methods and non- parametric bootstrap breakpoint tests, we characterize the crisis as a period in which pairwise correlations between yield spreads were systematically and significantly altered in the sense that spreads comoved with one another much more than in normal times. We find evidence that, for almost half of the 55 pairs under investigation, the crisis has left spreads much more correlated than they were previously. ...