Using data on more than 150.000 non-financial companies operating in both manufacturing and services sectors around the world, we analyse the drivers of firm performance throughout the whole COVID cycle (until end 2021). We highlight three key results. First, if anything, larger and older firms...

We test whether foreign demand matters for local house prices in the US using an identification strategy based on the existence of 'home bias abroad' in international real estate markets. Following an extreme political crisis event abroad, a proxy for a strong and exogenous shift in foreign...

We test whether foreign demand matters for local house prices in the US using an identification strategy based on the existence of 'home bias abroad' in international real estate markets. Following an extreme political crisis event abroad, a proxy for a strong and exogenous shift in foreign...

The extensive use of the US dollar when firms set prices for international trade (dubbed dominant currency pricing) and in their funding (dominant currency financing) has come to the forefront of policy debate, raising questions about how exchange rates work and the benefits of exchange rate...

Credit booms are a focal point for policymakers and scholars of financial crises. Yet our understanding of how the real sector behaves during booms, and why some booms may go bad, is limited. Despite a large and growing body of literature, most of the work has focused on aggregate economic...

We assess the impact of media sentiment on international equity prices using more than 4.5 million Reuters articles published across the globe between 1991 and 2015. News sentiment robustly predicts daily returns in both advanced and emerging markets, even after controlling for known...

Why did monetary authorities hold large gold reserves under Bretton Woods (1944-1971) when only the US had to? We argue that gold holdings were driven by institutional memory and persistent habits of central bankers. Countries continued to back currency in circulation with gold reserves,...

Why did monetary authorities hold large gold reserves under Bretton Woods (1944-1971) when only the US had to? We argue that gold holdings were driven by institutional memory and persistent habits of central bankers. Countries continued to back currency in circulation with gold reserves,...

We estimate world cycles using a new quarterly dataset of output, credit and asset prices assembled using IMF archives and covering a large set of advanced and emerging economies since 1950. World cycles, both real and financial, exist and are generally driven by US shocks. But their impact is...