We present a model of the optimal level of international reserves for a small open economy that is vulnerable to sudden stops in capital flows. Reserves allow the country to smooth domestic absorption in response to sudden stops, but yield a lower return than the interest rate on the country's...

We study whether capital flows affect the degree of credit crunch faced by a country's manufacturing firms during the 2007-09 crisis. Examining 3823 firms in 24 emerging countries, we find that the decline in stock prices was more severe for firms that are intrinsically more dependent on...

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. SUDDEN STOPS AND RESERVES: SOME FACTS -- III. THE MODEL -- IV. APPLICATIONS -- V. EXTENSIONS -- VI. CONCLUDING COMMENTS -- APPENDIX: COMPUTATIONS -- REFERENCES.

Monetary and fiscal policies around the world are in better shape today than two decades ago. This paper studies whether financial globalization has helped induce governments to pursue better macroeconomic policies (the "discipline effect"). The empirical tests have two innovations. First, we...

This paper presents a new database on government debt in 19 emerging market countries since 1980. The data set focuses on the structure of debt in terms of jurisdiction of insurance, maturity, currency composition and indexation. The paper presents stylized facts on debt structures and...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the dollarization of liabilities in emerging market economies is the result of a lack of monetary credibility. I present a model in which firms choose the currency composition of their debts so as to minimize their probability of default. Decreasing...

The literature on the benefits and costs of financial globalization for developing countries has exploded in recent years, but along many disparate channels and with a variety of apparently conflicting results. For instance, there is still little robust evidence of the growth benefits of broad...

In this paper, we adopt a cross-country perspective to examine the evolution of capital flows into China, both in terms of volumes and composition. China's inflows have generally been dominated by foreign direct investment (FDI), a pattern that appears to be favorable in light of the recent...

This paper examines possible segmentation of the internal capital market in China. We employ two standard tools from the international finance literature to analyze financial integration across Chinese provinces. Both tests confirm a similar (and somewhat surprising) picture: capital mobility...

This paper develops a theory of international trade in which financial development and factor endowments jointly determine comparative advantage. We apply the financial contract model of Holmstrom and Tirole (1998) to the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson (HOS) model in which firms' dependence on...