Policymakers increasingly view China’s rapidly growing wealth as a threat. China currently ranks second, or perhaps even first, in the world in gross domestic product (although 78th in per capita GDP), and the fear is that China will acquire military prowess commensurate with its wealth and...

Global firms finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, often shell companies in tax havens, which obscures their nationality in aggregate statistics. We associate the universe of traded securities with their issuer's ultimate parent and restate bilateral investment positions to better...

We explore the global footprint of Chinese banks and compare it with that of other bank nationalities. Chinese banks have become the largest cross-border creditors for almost half of all emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). Their global reach resembles that of banks from advanced...

We empirically characterize how China is internationalizing the Renminbi by selectively opening up its domestic bond market and propose a dynamic reputation model to understand China's internationalization strategy. While previously closed to foreign investors, China has recently allowed major...

Global firms finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, often shell companies in tax havens, which obscures their true economic location in official statistics. We associate the universe of traded securities issued by firms in tax havens with their issuer’s ultimate parent and restate...

Large uninsured risk, severe borrowing constraints, and rapid income growth can create excessively high household saving rates and large current account surpluses for emerging economies. Therefore, the massive foreign-reserve buildups by China are not necessarily the intended outcome of any...

Interest rate differentials between China and the rest of the world provide an attractive target for currency carry trade strategies, but remains problematic due to existing capital controls. We focus on copper holdings as an asset used to facilitate the carry trade. Using a unique dataset of...

This paper examines an anomaly in China's current account: its large and rapidly growing travel expenditure. Drawing evidence from counterparty data, Chinese international arrival statistics, and gravity equation models extended to travel trade, I find that a significant amount of China's travel...

Most of the expansion of global trade during the last three decades has been of the North-South kind – between capital-abundant developed and labour-abundant developing countries. Based on this observation, I argue that the recent growth of world trade is best understood from a...

This paper deals with two related issues: the sustainability of China’s exchange rate regime and the opening up of its capital account. The exchange rate discussion deliberately passes over the issue of the “equilibrium” value of the renminbi and its alleged undervaluation – typically at...