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Working Paper
The new regionalism and Asia: impact and options
New regional initiatives abound, both outside Asia and within. Free Trade Areas in the West - notably NAFTA, its possible enlargement into an FTA of the Americas, and the European Union - have implications for Asia. Asian manufacturers will experience trade diversion, especially in textiles and apparel. Balancing such losses is the likelihood of gains from higher import demand caused by stronger economic growth in the Americas and Europe. ; New estimates of the gravity model of bilateral trade confirm the presence of implicit or de facto trade blocs in Asia and the Pacific, as in Europe ...
Journal Article
A Pacific economic bloc: is there such an animal?
Conference Paper
The renminbi’s role in the global monetary system - commentary
Report
When is there a strong transfer risk from the sovereigns to the corporates? Property rights gaps and CDS spreads
When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it may be tempted to expropriate the private sector. This may be one reason why international investment in private companies has to take into account the sovereign risk. But the likelihood of sovereign risk transferring to corporates and increasing their risk of default may be mitigated by legal institutions that provide strong property rights protection. Using a novel credit default swaps (CDS) data set covering government and corporate entities across thirty countries, we study both the average strength of the transfer risks and the role of ...
Working Paper
Anticipations of foreign exchange volatility and bid-ask spreads
The paper studies the effect of the market's perceived exchange rate volatility on bid-ask spreads. The anticipated volatility is extracted from currency options data. An increase in the perceived volatility is found to widen bid-ask spreads. The direction of the effect is consistent with an option model of the spread, but the magnitude is smaller. An increase in trading volume of spot exchange rates also widens the spread. The omission of the trading volume, however, does not bias the estimate of the effect of the volatility on the spreads. Although the spread-volatility relations implied by ...