It is well established that private information is critical to our understanding of asset prices. In this paper we argue that it also affects international capital flows and use a simple two-country DSGE model to illustrate its impact. We show that private information (i) increases the...

This paper studies the geography of wealth transfers between 2007Q4 and 2008Q4, at the height of the global financial crisis. We construct valuation changes on bilateral external positions in equity, direct investment and portfolio debt to measure who benefited and who lost on their external...

This study examines whether pre-crisis international reserve accumulations, as well as exchange rate and reserve policy decisions made during the global financial crisis, can help to explain cross-country differences in post-crisis economic performance. Our approach focuses not only on the total...

Differences in financial systems are often named as a prime candidate for the current state of global imbalances. This paper focuses on cross-country heterogeneity in access to international financial markets that derives from the presence of capital controls and argues that the process of...

In the past, foreign borrowing by developing countries was comprised almost entirely of government borrowing. However, private firms and individuals in developing countries now borrow substantially from foreign lenders. It is often asserted that this surge in private sector borrowing generates...

This paper studies a two country model with traded and nontraded sectors, in which sector-specific capital goods, as in practice, are produced by combining inputs from all sectors. The model also includes nontraded distribution services employed in retailing traded goods to consumers. The...

Changes in asset prices of a country's foreign assets and liabilities (“valuation effects”) are commonly thought of as stabilizing: they counteract current account movements and mitigate the impact of the current account on the country's net foreign asset (NFA) position. This paper shows...

This paper provides instrumental variables estimates of the response of aggregate private consumption to transitory output shocks in poor countries. To identify exogenous, unanticipated, idiosyncratic and transitory variations in national output we use year-to-year variations in rainfall as an...

Our main goal is to characterize the determinants of sudden stops caused by domestic vis-à-vis foreign residents. Are the decisions of domestic investors to invest abroad or of foreign investors to cut off funds from the domestic economy governed by the same set of determinants? Given the...

We revisit the classic transfer problem, accounting for two channels of adjustment: increased trade in existing goods and services (the intensive margin) and net creation and destruction of product varieties (the extensive margin). Over the medium term, the latter reduces the scope for real...