The paper develops a model with lumpy setup costs, which govern the flow of bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI). Every country is potentially both a source for FDI flows to several host countries, and a host for FDI flows from several source countries. But technologically-advanced...

This paper explains how mortgage market liberalization can introduce greater volatility in the housing market. It begins by documenting two stylized facts for OECD countries that models with perfect credit markets fail to explain: (i) housing investment is about five times as volatile as output...

Recent macroeconomic experience has drawn attention to the importance of interdependence among countries through financial markets and institutions, independently of traditional trade linkages. This paper develops a model of the international transmission of shocks due to interdependent...

We develop a framework in which the host-country productivity has a positive effect on the intensive margin (the size of FDI flows), but only an ambiguous effect on the extensive margin (the likelihood of FDI flows to occur). The source-country productivity has a negative effect on the extensive...

This paper proposes a simple model to study how domestic institutions affect patterns of international capital flows. Inefficient financial system and poor corporate governance may be bypassed by two-way capital flows in which domestic savings leave the country in the form of financial capital...

This paper studies the value of external commitment to policy reforms in the case of WTO/GATT accessions. The accessions often entail reforms that go beyond narrowly defined trade liberalization, and have to overcome fierce resistance in the acceding countries, as reflected in protracted...