The recent episodes of financial turmoil in Mexico, East Asia, Russia, Brazil, and Argentina are often dubbed financial crises. However, the severe downturns in equity markets, abrupt currency devaluations, and massive capital flight that characterize these events can still be deemed compatible with efficient and functioning financial markets. Thus, why is a financial crisis a “crisis?” To answ...

CcmE is a heme chaperone that binds heme transiently in the periplasm of Escherichia coli and delivers it to newly synthesized and exported c-type cytochromes. The chemical nature of the covalent bond between heme and H130 is not known. We have purified soluble histidine-tagged CcmE and present its spectroscopic characteristics in the visible range. Alanine scanning mutagenesis of conserved ami...

In an aging world, how does a country’s demographic structure impact external positions in safe and risky assets and their respective prices? We answer these questions combining endogenous portfolio choice over the life-cycle with a two-region, general equilibrium model. We show that when one region is aging faster than the other, its demand for both safe and risky assets increases, whereas a g...

This paper is concerned with the estimation of New Keynesian Phillips Curves (NKPC) and focusses on two issues: the weak instrument problem and the characterisation of the steady states. It proposes some solutions from a global perspective. Using a global vector autoregressive model (GVAR) steady states are estimated as long-horizon expectations and valid instruments are constructed from the gl...

The U.S. is currently engulfed in the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. A key structural factor behind this crisis is the large demand for riskless assets from the rest of the world. In this paper we present a model to show how such demand not only triggered a sharp rise in U.S. asset prices, but also exposed the U.S. financial sector to a downturn by concentrating risk o...

This paper assesses the relative economic value of volatility and correlation timing in the context of asset allocation strategies. Using exchange rate data, we model the dynamic covariance matrix of daily returns by implementing a set of multivariate models based on Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) model of Engle (2002). Our analysis takes a Bayesian approach in both estimation and asset ...