Intervention operations are used by governments to manage their exchange rates but officials rarely confirm their presence in the market, leading inevitably to erroneous reports in the financial press. There are also reports of what we term, unrequited interventions, interventions that the...

Cross border capital flows and returns on assets are two key variables in international macroeconomics. Difficult endogeneity issues plague any analysis of their correlations in aggregate data. This paper examines the dynamics of international portfolios with a unique data set on the stock...

Over the period 1975 to 2005, the US dollar (particularly in relation to the Canadian dollar) and the euro and Swiss franc (particularly in the second half of the period) have moved against world equity markets. Thus these currencies should be attractive to risk-minimizing global equity...

This paper provides a framework for understanding the risks to borrowers and lenders in capital markets. We begin with a description of a capital markets in a domestic context. This allows us to focus on two key imperfections which lie at the heart of all financial systems: imperfect...

This paper analyzes prudential controls on capital flows to emerging markets from the perspective of a Pigouvian tax that addresses externalities associated with the deleveraging cycle. It presents a model in which restricting capital inflows during boom times reduces the potential outflows...

The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exacerbated its severity. In this paper, we...

We develop an international financial market model in which domestic and foreign residents differ in their beliefs about the information in economic signals. Similar to models of asymmetric information, we consider how informational advantages by domestic investors about local output impacts...

We investigate the impact of two types of financial liberalizations on short- and long-horizon capital flows to emerging markets in a framework that controls for push and pull factors. The first type of liberalization, a reduction in capital controls, is countrywide but uncertain, because its...

Writings on the macroeconomic impact of capital account liberalization find few, if any, robust effects of liberalization on real variables. In contrast to the prevailing wisdom, I argue that the textbook theory of liberalization holds up quite well to a critical reading of this literature. The...

Stocks with recent past high idiosyncratic volatility have low future average returns around the world. Across 23 developed markets, the difference in average returns between the extreme quintile portfolios sorted on idiosyncratic volatility is -1.31% per month, after controlling for world...