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 examines an anomaly in China's current account: its large and rapidly growing travel expenditure. Drawing evidence from counterparty data, Chinese international arrival statistics, and gravity equation models extended to travel trade, I find that a significant amount of China's travel...

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...

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...

This paper addresses three questions about the prospects for the U.S. current account deficit. Is it sustainable in the long term? If not, how long will it take for measures of external debt and debt service to reach levels that could prompt some pullback by global investors? And if and when...

This paper examines the effect of foreign lending on the domestic lending for US global banks. We show that greater foreign loan growth complements, rather than detracts from, domestic commercial lending. Exploiting a confidential data (FFIEC 009) on international loan exposure of US banks, we...

This paper examines the available data that may shed light on the carry trade in Japanese yen. We define an individual or a sector to be engaged in the carry trade if it has a short position in yen and a long position in other currencies. The tendency of large yen movements to be skewed toward...

​This paper studies episodes of exceptionally large capital inflows. We find that these events are typically accompanied by an economic boom, and followed by a slump. Moreover, during episodes of large capital inflows capital and labor shift out of the manufacturing sector, especially if the...

U.S. imports and exports respond little to exchange rate changes in the short run. Pricing behavior has long been thought central to explaining this response: if local prices do not respond to exchange rates, neither will trade flows. Sticky prices and strategic complementarities in price...

This paper builds a model of two types of Chinese exports, those processed and assembled largely from imported inputs (processed exports) and non-processed exports. Based on this model, the sensitivity of Chinese exports to exchange rate changes is empirically examined. Unlike previous work, the...