The causes of the 2008 collapse and subsequent surge in global capital flows remain an open and highly controversial issue. Employing a factor model coupled with a dataset of high-frequency portfolio capital flows to 50 economies, the paper finds that common shocks - key crisis events as well as...

We model sudden stops in a small open economy as rare discrete events precipitated by increases in the world risk-free rate. When external debt is large, the model exhibits multiple equilibria, one where external debt and consumption remain high, and one with a collapse in external debt and...