The paper offers an empirical taxonomy of the factors driving China's current account. A simple present-value model with non-tradeable goods explains more than 70 percent of current account variability over the period 1982-2007, including the persistent surpluses since 2001. Expected increases...

We define decoupling as an increase in the cross-country heterogeneity in long-term growth expectations. We identify growth expectations from a cointegrating relation between a country's output level and its stock market valuation. Fluctuations in this output-price or yp-ratio reflect changes in...

Estimates of the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign varieties are small in macroeconomic data, but substantially larger in disaggregated microeconomic studies. This may be an artifact of heterogeneity. We use disaggregated multilateral trade data to structurally identify...

A number of papers have shown that rapid growth in private sector credit is a strong predictor of a banking crisis. This paper will ask if credit growth is itself the cause of a crisis, or is it the combination of credit growth and external deficits? This paper estimates a probabilistic model to...

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...

We present a microfounded two-country model of global imbalances and debt deleveraging. A sustained rise in saving in one country can lead to a worldwide fall in interest rates and an accumulation of debt in the other country. When a subsequent deleveraging shock occurs, interest rates are...

Using available annual data of 174 economies since 1957, we examine the similarities and differences of seven international reserve ratios. While individual international reserve ratios display substantial variations across economies, they are associated with an economy's characteristics...

Empirical evidence from the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 suggests that exchange rate depreciation may have had a contractionary effect on the traded good sector of the worst-hit economies. Many writers have suggested that this was caused by exchange rate sensitive credit constraints...

The paper draws a link between the conditions for low pass-through when there are flexible prices, and local-currency pricing when there are sticky nominal prices. It shows that the condition under which pass-through is less than one-half when prices are flexible is the same as the condition...

This paper presents a new conceptual framework to measure sources of value-added trade by country in global production networks. With a parsimonious decomposition of gross exports that eliminates "double counting", it integrates all previous measures of vertical specialization and value-added...