Developing countries are constrained in financing current account deficits as real capital mobility is still far from perfect. At the same time, capital flows to these countries proved to be extremely volatile. The paper argues that the long-term problem of "too little" should not be confused...

Compared with China's dominance in world trade, its expanding role in global finance is poorly documented and understood. Over the past decades, China has exported record amounts of capital to the rest of the world. Many of these financial flows are not reported to the IMF, the BIS or the World...

Germany is world champion in exporting capital ("Exportweltmeister"). No other country invests larger amounts of savings outside its borders. However, Germany plays in the third division when it comes to investment performance, as we show in this paper. We study the returns on German foreign...

U.S. equity outperformance and sustained dollar appreciation have led to large valuation gains for the rest of the world on the U.S. external position. The author constructs their global distribution, carefully accounting for the role of tax havens. Valuation gains are concentrated and large in...

China’s lending boom to developing countries is morphing into defaults and debt distress. Given the secrecy surrounding China’s loans, also the associated defaults remain “hidden”, as missed payments and restructuring details are not disclosed. We construct an encompassing dataset of...

This paper shows that China has launched a new global system for cross-border rescue lending to countries in debt distress. We build the first comprehensive dataset on China’s overseas bailouts between 2000 and 2021 and provide new insights into China’s growing role in the global financial...

In the past decade, Germany has been the world champion in exporting capital (“Exportweltmeister”). No other country invested larger amounts of savings outside its borders. However, we find that Germany plays in the third division when it comes to investment performance. To show this, we...

The global financial system is highly complex, with cross-border interconnections and interdependencies. In this highly interconnected environment, local financial shocks and events can be easily amplified and turned into global events. This paper analyzes the dependencies among nearly 4,000...

Global engagement of firms can take a variety of forms. We argue that there are considerable advantages of developing models that allow for a wide set of alternatives of organizational form. We illustrate this firstly using plant level data which allows us to distinguish firms that serve only...

This paper analyzes a stylized model of international capital mobility and diffusion of embodied technologies from North to South. The South can fall behind in terms of technologies or get trapped in a situation, in which it is unable to attract foreign capital and embodied technologies, if its...