Global current account imbalances have reappeared, although the extent and distribution of these imbalances are noticeably different from those experienced in the middle of the last decade. What does that recurrence mean for our understanding of the origin and nature of such imbalances? Will...

This paper investigates Rodrik's political-economy trilemma: policy makers face a trade-off of choosing two out of three policy goals or governance styles, namely, (hyper-) globalization, national sovereignty, and democracy. We develop a set of indexes that measure the extent of attainment of...

We outline two divergent exit strategies of the U.S. from the post COVID-19 debt-overhang, and analyze their implications on Emerging Markets and global stability. The first strategy is the U.S. aiming at returning to the 2019, pre-COVID mode of loose fiscal policy and accommodating monetary...

This paper overviews different exit strategies for the U.S. from the debt-overhang, and analyses their implications for emerging markets and global stability. These strategies are discussed in the context of the debates about secular-stagnation versus debt-overhang, the fiscal theory of the...

Using the "trilemma indexes" developed by Aizenman et al. (2008) that measure the extent of achievement in each of the three policy goals in the trilemma--monetary independence, exchange rate stability, and financial openness--we examine how policy configurations affect macroeconomic...

We develop a methodology that intuitively characterizes the choices countries have made with respect to the trilemma during the post Bretton-Woods period. The paper first outlines the new metrics for measuring the degree of exchange rate flexibility, monetary independence, and capital account...

We investigate the role of budget balances, financial development and openness, in the evolution of global imbalances. Financial development -- or the lack thereof -- has received considerable attention as a possible contributing factor to the development of persistent and expanding current...

We investigate the medium-term determinants of the current account using a model that controls for factors related to institutional development, with a goal of informing the recent debate over the existence and relevance of the "savings glut." The economic environmental factors that we consider...

We extend our earlier work, focusing on the links between capital account liberalization, legal and institutional development, and financial development, especially that in equity markets. In a panel data analysis encompassing 108 countries and twenty years ranging from 1980 to 2000, we explore...

The empirical relationship between capital controls and the financial development of credit and equity markets is examined. We extend the literature on this subject along a number of dimensions. Specifically, we (1) investigate a substantially broader set of proxy measures of financial...