The essays brought together in this volume share a common objective: To bring a unifying methodological approach to the analysis of financial problems in developing, open economies. While the primary focus is on contemporary Latin America, the methods employed and the lessons learned are of...

This paper evaluates the gains from international risk sharing in some simple general-equilibrium models with output uncertainty. Under empirically plausible calibration, the Incremental loss from a ban on international portfolio diversification is estimated to be quite small--0.15 percent of...

Despite an abundance of cross-section, panel, and event studies, there is strikingly little convincing documentation of direct positive impacts of financial opening on the economic welfare levels or growth rates of developing countries. The econometric difficulties are similar to those that...

The rapid growth of international reserves---a development concentrated in the emerging markets---remains a puzzle. In this paper we suggest that a model based on financial stability and financial openness goes far toward explaining reserve holdings in the modern era of globalized capital...

We show that the when one takes into account the global equilibrium ramifications of an unwinding of the US current account deficit, currently estimated at 5.4% of GDP, the potential collapse of the dollar becomes considerably larger--more than 50% larger--than our previous estimates (Obstfeld...