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...

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...

This paper studies a two country model with economies disaggregated into traded and non-traded sectors and in which investment goods as in practice are produced by combining inputsfrom all sectors. The model also accounts for nontraded distribution services employed in retail-ing traded goods to...

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...

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...

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...

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...