A country's exchange rate is at the center of economic and political debates on currency wars and trade competitiveness. The real consequences of exchange rate fluctuations depend critically on how firms set prices in international markets. Recent empirical evidence has challenged the dominant...

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...

Capital mobility impedes the ability of authorities to pursue independent policy goals. Market participants will drive the informal adoption of the most adaptive currency. The current paper is descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive. A Granger-Sims causality test shows the dependency of...

Why are foreigners willing to invest almost $2 trillion per year in the United States? The answer affects if the existing pattern of global imbalances can persist and if the United States can continue to finance its current account deficit without a major change in asset prices and returns. This...

This study examines a range of crossborder infrastructure development issues related to the Asian countries. Despite active pursuit of private investment in infrastructure by most developing countries in Asia and a growing number of success stories, the pace of such investment remains slow....

This paper constructs a data set on stocks of bilateral external assets and liabilities for a group of 18 countries, including developed and emerging economies. The data set covers the years 1980 to 2005 and distinguishes between four asset classes: foreign direct investment, portfolio equity,...

We employ a neoclassical growth model to assess the impact of financial liberalization in a developing country on capital owners` and workers` consumption and welfare. We find in a baseline calibration for an average non-OECD country that capitalists suffer a 42 percent reduction in permanent...

This paper documents four trends in Asia: (1) the increase in the magnitude of gross capital inflows and outflows; (2) the larger magnitude of gross capital inflows relative to outflows in some countries; (3) the increase in the volatility of these capital flows; and (4) the steady increase in...

Our friend and colleague Rüdiger Dornbusch passed away before he was able tocomplete his book based on the Munich Lectures in Economics that he gave inNovember 17, 1998, at the Center for Economic Studies of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.The lectures contain a fascinating overview of the...