This paper assesses the effectiveness of risk sharing mechanisms in Europe by breaking down the factor income components into their sub-components, and aims to further examine whether financial integration and international portfolio diversification boosts or dampens risk sharing. Using a panel of European countries, we compare the years before and after the 2008 financial crisis. We extend the literature by properly taking into account the heterogeneity (in both country and time dimensions) in the panel through new econometric models. Our results show that financial income has become a major channel of risk sharing in recent years and that a higher integration in the bond and equity markets significantly improves risk sharing in the long term.
During the 2000s, we observed the accumulation of global imbalances resulting primarily from massive current account imbalances in the USA and in Asia. This paper studies the impact of external shocks on East Asian countries in order to determine if these can account for the Asian side of global imbalances. To this end, we estimate a structural vector autoregression (VAR) model with block exogeneity using Bayesian inference. The three external shocks are an oil shock, a US monetary shock and a US financial shock. Our main findings are as follows: (i) external shocks account for the current account surplus in Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand and, to a lesser extent, in Japan and Indonesia; (ii) the oil shock and the US monetary shock seem to have influenced current account balances through real and monetary channels, and the US financial shock through the financial channel.
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