Many companies on China's stock markets have separate, restricted classes of shares for domestic residents and foreigners. These shares are identical other than who can own them, but foreigners pay only about one-quarter the price paid by domestic residents. We show that plausible...

How does sovereign risk affect investors' behavior? We answer this question using a novel database that combines sovereign default probabilities for 27 developed and emerging markets with monthly data on the portfolios of individual bond mutual funds. We first show that changes in yields do not...

This paper studies the impact of recessions on the longer-run level of output using data on 23 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We find that severe recessions have a sustained and sizable negative impact on the level of output. This sustained decline in output raises questions about...

Projections of sustained strong growth in India depend importantly on the utilization of the huge increase in India's working-age population projected over the next two decades. To date, however, India's economic growth has been concentrated in high-skill and capital-intensive sectors, and has...

A growing body of evidence suggests that an important reason why firms do not change prices nearly as much as standard theory predicts is out of concern for disrupting ongoing customer relationships because price changes may be viewed as unfair. Existing models that try to capture this concern...

In 2010, in response to an ever-worsening fiscal crisis, the ECB began purchasing sovereign debt from troubled euro-area countries through its Securities Market Programme (SMP). This program was designed to improve market functioning and restore the monetary transmission mechanism within the...

Theory predicts that a nation's stochastic intertemporal budget constraint is satisfied if net foreign assets (NFA) are integrated of any finite order, or if net exports (NX) and NFA satisfy an error-correction specification with a residual integrated of any finite order. We test these...

Survey data show that the expected growth rates of consumption across countries vary widely and are not highly correlated. This data contradicts the simplest of open-economy models in which there is a freely traded non-state-contingent bond and purchasing power parity holds. We explore two...

Models of business cycles in emerging economies explain the negative correlation between country spreads and output by modeling default risk as an exogenous interest rate on working capital. Models of strategic default explain the cyclical properties of sovereign spreads by assuming an exogenous...

This paper addresses the popular view that differences in financial development explain the pattern of global current account imbalances. One strain of thinking explains the net flow of capital from developing to industrial economies on the basis of the industrial economies' more advanced...