It is well understood that investment serves as a shock absorber at the time of crisis. The duration of the drag on investment, however, is perplexing. For the nine Asian economies we focus on in this study, average investment/GDP is about 6 percentage points lower during 1998-2012 than its...

Financial openness is often associated with higher rates of economic growth. We show that the impact of openness on factor productivity growth is more important than the effect on capital growth. This explains why the growth effects of liberalization appear to be largely permanent, not...

This paper investigates the impact of credit rating changes on the sovereign spreads in the European Union and investigates the macro and financial factors that account for the time varying effects of a given credit rating change. We find that changes of ratings are informative, economically...

Forbes and Warnock (2012) identify episodes of extreme capital flow movements--surges, stops, flight, and retrenchment--and find that global factors, especially global risk, are significantly associated with extreme capital flow episodes whereas domestic macroeconomic characteristics and capital...

We study stock returns over the period of the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 and identify three crisis "shock factors" related to unique features of the crisis: (1) the collapse of global demand, (2) the contraction of credit supply, and (3) selling pressure on firms' equity. All three of...

One of the main economic villains before the crisis was the presence of large "global imbalances." The concern was that the U.S. would experience a sudden stop of capital flows, which would unavoidably drag the world economy into a deep recession. However, when the crisis finally did come, the...

We document that the global scope and depth of the crisis the began with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the summer of 2007 is unprecedented in the post World War II era and, as such, the most relevant comparison benchmark is the Great Depression (or the Great Contraction, as...

The global crisis highlights the continued vulnerability of developing countries to shocks from advanced economies. Just a few years after the global crisis, the eurozone sovereign debt crisis has emerged as the single biggest threat to the global outlook. In this paper, we apply the event study...

For many countries, the most significant barriers to trade in financial assets have been knocked down. Yet, the financial world is not flat because poor governance prevents firms from being widely held and from taking full advantage of financial globalization. Poor governance has implications...

International consumption risk sharing studies have largely ignored their models' counterfactual implications for asset returns although these returns incorporate direct market measures of risk. In this paper, we modify a canonical risk-sharing model to generate more plausible asset return...