The emergence of new equity markets in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Mideast and Africa provides a new menu of opportunities for investors. These markets exhibit high expected returns as well as high volatility. Importantly, the low correlations with developed countries' equity markets...

A central feature of emerging markets crises is the Sudden Stop' phenomenon characterized by large reversals of capital inflows and current accounts, deep recessions, and collapses in asset prices. This paper proposes an open-economy asset-pricing model with financial frictions that yields...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that job polarization associated with skill-biased technological change accelerated during the Great Recession. We use a standard neoclassical growth framework to analyze how business cycle fluctuations interact with the long-run transition towards a...

International capital flows, while potentially beneficial, are said to increase a country's vulnerability to crisis - especially if they are skewed to non-FDI types. This paper studies whether the volume and composition of capital flows affect the degree of credit crunch faced by a country's...

We examine the short- and long-run effects of financial liberalization on capital markets. To do so, we construct a new comprehensive chronology of financial liberalization in 28 mature and emerging economies since 1973. We also construct an algorithm to identify booms and busts in stock market...

In this paper we use weekly stock market data for a group of Latin American countries to analyze the behavior of volatility through time. We are particularly interested in understanding whether periods of high volatility are correlated across countries. The analysis uses both on univariate and...

When countries attempt to stabilize annual inflation rates that are greater than 40 percent, the domestic stock market appreciates by 24 percent on average. The present value of the long-run benefits to shareholders of reducing high inflation outweighs the present value of the short-run costs....

Within the context of conditional asset allocation strategies, this paper explores the implications of the low correlations of the emerging market returns with developed market returns and the relatively high degree predictability of emerging countries' returns. It is well known that low...

This paper evaluates the impact of tapering “news” announcements by Fed senior policy makers on financial markets in emerging economies. We apply a panel framework using daily data, and find that emerging market asset prices respond most to statements by Fed Chairman Bernanke, and much less...

Firm-level stock returns exhibit comovement above that in fundamentals, and the gap tends to be higher in developing countries. We investigate whether correlated beliefs among sophisticated, but imperfectly informed, traders can account for the patterns of return correlations across countries....