China’s emergence as a major player in world trade is well known, but its rising role in global finance is perhaps underappreciated. China is the second largest creditor in the world today, with a net creditor position of exceeding 30% of GDP in 2007. In this paper, we test the importance of...

Our goal in this project is to gain a better empirical understanding of the internationalfinancial implications of currency movements. To this end, we construct a databaseof international currency exposures for a large panel of countries over 1990-2004.We show that trade-weighted exchange rate...

The standard model of currency crises is amended to distinguish betweenunemployment aversion and financial fragility. Fragility is assumed to affect theauthorities’ sensitivity to a combination of high real interest rates and unemployment.An increase in fragility expands the region of...

In light of the recent financial crises in the emerging markets, the coming-into-force of the financial services agreement under the GATS has been considered a success. While the agreement provides forlittle new liberalization but rather formalizes the status quo, it was feared that governments...

The consensus about the ability of the standard open-economy neoclassical growthmodel to account for interest-rate driven business cycles has changed over time:whereas early research concluded that business cycles are neutral to interest-rateshocks, more recent investigations suggest that these...

After liberalizing international transactions of financial assets, many countries experiencelarge swings in asset prices, capital flows, and aggregate production. This paper studies howthe adjustment to capital account liberalization depends upon the degree of development of adomestic financial...

This paper analyzes a useful accounting framework that breaks down the current account to twocomponents: a composition effect and a growth effect.We show that past empirical evidence, which stronglysupports the growth effect as the main driver of current account dynamics, is misconceived. The...

This paper provides a new theory of international capital ows. In a frameworkthat integrates factor-proportions-based trade and nancial capital ows, a novel forceemerges: capital tends to ow towards countries that become more specialized incapital-intensive industries. This `composition' eect...

The `quantity anomalies' that arise from standard international business cycle models are cross-country correlations in consumption being higher than output, and negative comovement in aggregate investment and employment. This paper shows thatincorporating multiple sectors with heterogeneous...