When countries open their stock markets to foreign investors, firms that become eligible for purchase by foreigners (investible) are repriced according to the difference in the covariance of their returns with the local and world market. An investible firm whose return covariance with the local...

Writings on the macroeconomic impact of capital account liberalization find few, if any, robust effects of liberalization on real variables. In contrast to the prevailing wisdom, I argue that the textbook theory of liberalization holds up quite well to a critical reading of this literature. The...

Newly developed long historical time series on public debt, along with modern data on external debts, allow a deeper analysis of the cycles underlying serial debt and banking crises. The evidence confirms a strong link between banking crises and sovereign default across the economic history of...

In the year that capital-poor countries open their stock markets to foreign investors, the growth rate of their typical firm's capital stock exceeds its pre-liberalization mean by 4.1 percentage points. In each of the next three years the average growth rate of the capital stock for the 369...

We confront the two opposing views of capital account liberalization in developing countries with a new firm-level dataset on investment, stock prices, and sales. In the three-year period following liberalizations, the growth rate of the typical firm's capital stock exceeds its...

When countries attempt to stabilize annual inflation rates that are greater than 40 percent, the domestic stock market appreciates by 24 percent on average. The present value of the long-run benefits to shareholders of reducing high inflation outweighs the present value of the short-run costs....

There is a rich scholarly literature on sovereign default on external debt. Comparatively little is known about sovereign defaults on domestic debt. Even today, cross-country data on domestic public debt remains curiously exotic, particularly prior to the 1980s. We have filled this gap in the...

This paper uses a data set of over two hundred years of sovereign debt, banking and inflation crises to explore the question of how long it takes a country to "graduate" from the typical pattern of serial crisis that most emerging markets experience. We find that for default and inflation...

The historical frequency of banking crises is quite similar in high- and middle-to-low-income countries, with quantitative and qualitative parallels in both the run-ups and the aftermath. We establish these regularities using a unique dataset spanning from Denmark's financial panic during 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...