From the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, per-capita GDP in the economies of East Asia grew almost three times as fast as in the economies of Latin America. Specifically, in 1950, the economies of the Asian Tigers (Japan, South Korea, Singapore and...

Does capital flow to locations with a relatively high rate of return? We address this question by constructing a panel database of over 100 countries between 1950 and 2005, accounting for about 99 percent of world real income in 2005. With these data, we construct two measures of the rate of...

Sovereign defaults are time consuming and costly to resolve ex post. But these costs also improve borrowing incentives ex ante. What is the optimal tradeoff between efficient borrowing ex ante and the costs of default ex post? What policy reforms, from collective action clauses to an...

Is increased competition in international financial markets desirable? On the one hand, reductions in mnopoly power can be efficiency improving. On the other, increased competition may make it hard to coordinate in disciplining debtors in default. This paper presents a model that formalizes this...

International capital markets do not work perfectly. But are the imperfections severe enough that they need to be taken into account when modeling international capital flows? And if so, which of the many different possible forms of financial market imperfection best describe the data on...

Our study complements existing studies of the degree of capital mobility based on an examination of explicit capital controls (e.g. Miniane 2004), the quantity of capital flows (Obstfeld & Taylor 2004), the relationship between investment and savings (e.g. Feldstein & Horioka 1980), cross...

What do changes in sectoral/regional productivity look like? How do they aggregate up? In this study we quantify the importance of sectoral and regional propagations of disaggregated changes in productivity. To do so, we use a multi-region, multi-sector model to identify the changes in sectoral...

We propose a theory of firm dynamics in which workers have ideas for new projects that can be sold in a market to existing firms or, at a cost, implemented in new firms: spin-offs. Workers have private information about the quality of their ideas. Because of an adverse selection problem, workers...

Why do firms decide to offshore certain parts of their production process? What qualifies certain countries as particularly attractive locations to offshore? In this paper we address these questions with a theory of international production hierarchies in which teams arise endogenously to make...

Why do firm growth and exit rates decline with size? What determines the size distribution of firms and plants? This paper addresses these questions in a dynamic model of firm size with entry and exit that emphasizes the accumulation of specific factors in response to industry specific...