This paper argues that the globalization of securities markets may promote contagion among investors by weakening incentives for gathering costly country-specific information and by strengthening incentives for imitating arbitrary market portfolios. In the presence of short-selling constraints,...

Two observations suggest that financial globalization played an important role in the recent financial crisis. First, more than half of the rise in net borrowing of the U.S. nonfinancial sectors since the mid 1980s has been financed by foreign lending. Second, the collapse of the U.S. housing...

Financial globalization was off to a rocky start in emerging economies hit by Sudden Stops since the mid 1990s. Foreign reserves grew very rapidly during this period, and hence it is often argued that we live in the era of a New Merchantilism in which large stocks of reserves are a war-chest for...