In this paper we connect the events of the last twelve months, "The Panic of 2008" as it has been called, to the demand for international reserves. In previous work, we have shown that international reserve demand can be rationalized by a central bank's desire to backstop the broad money supply...

This paper analyzes the evolution of the degree of global cyclical interdependence over the period 1960-2005. We categorize the 106 countries in our sample into three groups -- industrial countries, emerging markets, and other developing economies. Using a dynamic factor model, we then decompose...

This paper analyzes the consequences of the internationalization of the Chinese renminbi for the global monetary system and its possible ascension to reserve currency status. In an unstable and financially integrated world, governments' precautionary demand for reserve assets is likely to...

We develop a new dynamic factor model that allows us to jointly characterize global macroeconomic and financial cycles and the spillovers between them. The model decomposes macroeconomic cycles into the part driven by global and country-specific macro factors and the part driven by spillovers...

Are financial crises a negative shock to demand or a negative shock to supply? This is a fundamental question for both macroeconomics researchers and those involved in real-time policymaking, and in both cases the question has become much more urgent in the aftermath of the recent financial...

Do external imbalances increase the risk of financial crises? In this paper, we study the experience of 14 developed countries over 140 years (1870-2008). We exploit our long-run dataset in a number of different ways. First, we apply new statistical tools to describe the temporal and spatial...

The crisis of the advanced economies in 2008-09 has focused new attention on money and credit fluctuations, financial crises, and policy responses. We study the behavior of money, credit, and macroeconomic indicators over the long run based on a new historical dataset for 14 countries over the...

The literature on the benefits and costs of financial globalization for developing countries has exploded in recent years, but along many disparate channels with a variety of apparently conflicting results. We attempt to provide a unified conceptual framework for organizing this vast and growing...

In our book, Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis, and Growth, we traced out the evolution of the international monetary system using the framework of the "international monetary trilemma": countries can enjoy at most two from the set {exchange-rate stability, open capital markets, and...

In broad perspective, there have been essentially two competing views of the global financial crisis, albeit there are some complementarities among them. One view looks across the border: it mainly blames external imbalances, the large-scale mix of unprecedented pattern current account deficits...