We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across 18 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To address these...

We study the characteristics of credit booms in emerging and industrial economies. Macro data show a systematic relationship between credit booms and economic expansions, rising asset prices, real appreciations and widening external deficits. Micro data show a strong association between credit...

In theory, one of the main benefits of financial globalization is that it should allow for more efficient international risk sharing. This paper provides a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the patterns of risk sharing among different groups of countries and examines how international...

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...

Dollarization in financial intermediation has exhibited a widely diverse pattern across countries. Empirical work relating it to macroeconomic variables has had only limited success in explaining the phenomenon. This paper presents a two-currency banking model to show that deposit and loan...

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...

Empirical studies have had little success in finding a statistically significant relationship between fiscal deficits and inflation in broad cross-country panels. This paper provides new econometric estimates for a panel of 23 emerging market countries during 1970-2000. Unlike previous studies,...

Financial globalization was off to a rocky start in emerging economies hit by Sudden Stops in the 1990s. The surge in foreign reserves since then is viewed as a New Merchantilism in which reserves are a war-chest for defense against Sudden Stops. We conduct a quantitative assessment of this...

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...