In theory, nominal exchange rate movements can lead to “expenditure switching” when they generate changes in the relative prices of goods across countries. This paper explores whether the expenditure-switching role of exchange rates has changed in the current episode of significant global...

The causes of the 2008 collapse and subsequent surge in global capital flows remain an open and highly controversial issue. Employing a factor model coupled with a dataset of high-frequency portfolio capital flows to 50 economies, the paper finds that common shocks – key crisis events as well...

Relative to the “global savings glut” (GSG) hypothesis, we present a more complete picture of how capital flows contributed to the financial crisis, drawing attention to the sizable inflows from European investors into U.S. private-label asset-backed securities (ABS), including...

Motivated by recent empirical work, this paper formalizes a theory of competitive savings — an arms race in household savings for mating competition that is made more fierce by an increase in the male-to-female ratio in the pre-marital cohort. Relative to the empirical work, the theory can...

Using a novel dataset that allows us to trace the bank relationships of a sample of mostly unlisted firms, we explore which borrowers are able to benefit from foreign bank presence in emerging markets. Our results suggest that the limits to financial integration are less tight than the static...

Numerous studies have documented substantial deviations from the law of one price for consumer goods. However, in most cases small transaction costs can explain these violations. In our study, we purposely focus on a market where such frictions are minimal, namely online bookselling in the US...

The last twenty years have witnessed periods of sustained appreciations of the real exchange rate in emerging economies. The case of Mexico between 1988 and 2002 is representative of several episodes in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe in which countries opening to capital flows...

We investigate whether leading indicators can help explain the cross-country incidence of the 2008–09 financial crisis. Rather than looking for indicators with specific relevance to the recent crisis, the selection of variables is driven by an extensive review of more than eighty papers from...

Heterogeneity in size and productivity is central to models that explain which manufacturing firms export. This study presents descriptive evidence on similar heterogeneity among international banks as financial services providers. A novel and detailed bank-level data set reveals the volume and...