We provide a comprehensive account of the dynamics of eurozone countries from 2000 to 2012. We analyze private leverage, fiscal policy, labor costs and interest rates and we propose a strategy to separate the impact of credit cycles, excessive government spending, and sudden stops. We then ask...

Rebalancing growth patterns of Asian economies is an important component of the overall rebalancing effort that will be required in the world economy. In this paper, I provide an empirical characterization of the composition of GDP levels and growth rates for the key emerging markets and other...

One of the most serious problems that a central bank in an emerging market economy can face, is the sudden reversal of capital inflows. Hoarding international reserves can be used to smooth the impact of such reversals, but these reserves are seldom sufficient and always expensive to hold. In...

Emerging market economies, which have much of their growth ahead of them, run persistent current account deficits in order to smooth consumption intertemporally. The counterpart of these deficits is their dependence on capital inflows, which can suddenly stop. In this paper we develop and...

The classical Heckscher-Ohlin-Mundell paradigm states that trade and capital mobility are substitutes, in the sense that trade integration reduces the incentives for capital to flow to capital-scarce countries. In this paper we show that in a world with heterogeneous financial development, the...

This paper examines the behavior of real GDP (levels and growth rates), unemployment, inflation, bank credit, and real estate prices in a twenty one-year window surrounding selected adverse global and country-specific shocks or events. The episodes include the 1929 stock market crash, the 1973...

We document the recent phenomenon of "uphill" flows of capital from nonindustrial to industrial countries and analyze whether this pattern of capital flows has hurt growth in nonindustrial economies that export capital. Surprisingly, we find that there is a positive correlation between current...

Even well managed emerging market economies are exposed to significant external risk, the bulk of which is financial. At a moment's notice, these economies may be required to reverse the capital inflows that have supported the preceding boom. While capital flows crises are sudden nonlinear...

We study economic growth and inflation at different levels of government and external debt. Our analysis is based on new data on forty-four countries spanning about two hundred years. The dataset incorporates over 3,700 annual observations covering a wide range of political systems,...

China's high corporate savings rate is commonly claimed to be a key driver for the country's large current account surplus. The mainstream explanation for high corporate savings is a combination of windfall profits in state-owned firms, especially in resource sectors, and mis-governance of...