This paper examines several aspects of the debate about the causes of the U.S. current account deficit in the 1980's. It surveys several popular explanations before developing two theoretical models of international capital flows. The first model is Ricardian, and it extends the analysis of...

The "global saving glut" (GSG) hypothesis argues that the surge in capital inflows from emerging market economies to the United States led to significant declines in long-term interest rates in the United States and other industrial economies. In turn, these lower interest rates, when combined...

Foreign official purchases of U.S. government bonds have an economically large and statistically significant impact on long-term interest rates. Federal Reserve credibility, as evidenced by dramatic reductions in both long-term inflation expectations and the volatility of long rates, contributed...

The sensitivity of the main global liquidity components, international loan and bond flows, to global factors varied considerably over the past decade. The estimated sensitivity to US monetary policy rose substantially in the immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, peaked around the...

This paper analyzes the financial flows from foreign subsidiaries of American multinational corporations to their parent corporations in the U.S. These repatriations are important not only to U.S. investors, who thereby have access to those funds, but also to the U.S. government, which generally...

An open question in the literature on the taxation of multinational corporations is whether repatriation taxes influence whether the profits of foreign subsidiaries are repatriated or reinvested abroad. Theoretical models suggest that dividend remittances should not be influenced by repatriation...

Conventional wisdom in the field of international finance holds that the U.S. economy has become so open financiallly as to be characterized by perfect capital mobility: a highly elastic supply of foreign capital prevents the domestic rate of return from rising significantly above the world rate...

We survey several mechanisms that explain the composition of international capital flows: foreign direct investment, foreign portfolio investment and debt flows (bank loans and bonds). We focus on information frictions such as adverse selection and moral hazard, and exposure to liquidity shocks,...