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...

The surge in international asset trade since the early 1990s has lead to renewed interest in models with international portfolio choice, an aspect that was largely cast aside when the ad-hoc portfolio balance models of the 1970s were replaced bymodels of optimizing agents. We develop the...

In an in‡uential series of contributions, Kraay and Ventura (2000, 2003) o¤er a“new rule” for the current account: in response to a temporary income shock, thechange in the current account is equal to the change in saving times the ratio of netforeign assets to wealth. We analyze the...

We develop a new theory of international capital flows based on dispersed in-formation across individual investors. There is extensive evidence of informationheterogeneity within and across countries, which has proven critical to under-standing asset price behavior. We introduce information...

This paper reassesses, at the light of economic and financial theory, the well-documented recent evolution of the euro area public debt and equity markets.

In this study, we first estimate the level of financial integration for twenty five emerging stock markets over the last decade. Using a multivariate GARCH(1,1)-M return generating model allowing for partial market integration as well as for the pricing of systematic emerging market risk, we...

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...