One of the most serious problems that a central bank in an emerging market economy can face is the sudden reversal of capital inflows. Hoarding international reserves can be used to smooth the impact of such reversals, but these reserves are seldom sufficient and always expensive to hold. In...

This paper explores the consequences of extremely low real interest rates in a world with integrated but heterogenous capital markets and nominal rigidities. We establish four main results: (i) Liquidity traps spread to the rest of the world through the current account, which we illustrate with...

Three of the most important recent facts in global macroeconomics - the sustained rise in the US current account deficit, the stubborn decline in long run real rates, and the rise in the share of US assets in global portfolio - appear as anomalies from the perspective of conventional wisdom and...

Emerging economies experience sudden stops in capital inflows. As we have argued in Caballero and Krishnamurthy (2002), having access to monetary policy during these sudden stops is useful, but mostly for quot;insurancequot; rather than for aggregate demand reasons. In this environment, a...

Emerging economies are exposed to severe and sudden shortages of international financial resources. Yet domestic agents seem not to undertake enough precautions against these sudden stops. Following our previous work, we highlight in this paper the central role played by limited domestic...

Emerging economies are prone to crises triggered by external shocks. During these crises, should the central bank stabilize the currency or domestic interest rates? If the choice is outside the central bank's control, as in a currency board, are there good policy substitutes? We argue that these...

We develop a model of gross capital flows and analyze their role in global financial stability. In our model, consistent with the data, when a country experiences asset fire sales, foreign investments exit (fickleness) while domestic investments abroad return home (retrenchment). When countries...

In Caballero and Simsek (2018), we develop a model of fickle capital flows and show that, when countries are similar, international flows create global liquidity and mitigate crises despite their fickleness. In this paper, we focus on the asymmetric situation of Emerging Markets (EM) exchanging...

The classical Heckscher-Ohlin-Mundell paradigm states that trade and capital mobility are substitutes, in the sense that trade integration reduces the incentives for capital to flow to capital-scarce countries. In this paper we show that in a world with heterogeneous financial development, the...

Emerging market economies, which have much of their growth ahead of them, either run or should run persistent current account deficits in order to smooth consumption intertemporally. The counterpart of these deficits is their dependence on capital inflows, which can suddenly stop. We make two...