Despite the liberalization of capital flows among OECD countries, equity home bias remains sizable. We depart from the two familiar explanations of equity home bias: transaction costs that impede international diversification, and terms of trade responses to supply shocks that provide risk...

This paper analyses the determinants of international asset portfolios, using a neoclassical dynamic general equilibrium model with home bias in consumption. For plausible parameter values, the model explains the fact that typical investors hold most of their wealth in domestic assets (portfolio...

This paper incorporates a global bank into a two-country business cycle model. The bank collects deposits from households and makes loans to entrepreneurs, in both countries. It has to finance a fraction of loans using equity. We investigate how such a bank capital requirement affects the...

This paper examines the link between liquidity constraints and investment behaviour on the one hand, and firm size on the other for a large sample of German firms over the time period 1968-85. The results indicate that smaller firms tend to have investment functions which are more sensitive to...

Over the last three decades there has been a dramatic increase in the size of the financial sector and in the compensation of financial executives. This increase has been associated with greater risk-taking and the use of more complex financial instruments. Parallel to this trend, the...

Using novel indicators of political connections constructed from campaign contribution data, we show that Brazilian firms that provided contributions to (elected) federal deputies experienced higher stock returns than firms that don’t around the 1998 and 2002 elections. This suggests...

It is well known that temporal aggregation has adverse effects on Granger causality tests. Time series are often sampled at different frequencies. This is typically ignored, and data are merely aggregated to the common lowest frequency. We develop a set of Granger causality tests that explicitly...

We review the large literature on various economic policies that could help developing economies effectively manage the process of financial globalization. Our central findings indicate that policies promoting financial sector development, institutional quality and trade openness appear to help...

We study the role of productivity and corporate taxation as driving forces of FDI among OECD countries in the presence of threshold barriers, which generate two margins for FDI decisions. Some simulations, based on the estimation results, suggest that there are marked differences in the...

This paper proposes a simple model to study the relationship between domestic institutions - financial system, corporate governance, and property rights protection - and patterns of international capital flows. It studies conditions under which financial globalization can be a substitute for...