New EU members share two very marked features which have conflicting implications for the evolution of their real exchange rates in the long run: accelerated growth and systematic current account imbalances, which would anticipate, respectively an appreciation and a depreciation of their...

This study examines the impact of capital controls using monthly information to construct higher-frequency, quarterly indexes for Malaysia during the period 2000–2008 and Thailand over the period 2000–2010 in a vector auto-regression model. The results show that restrictions in Thailand have...

Germany is world champion in exporting capital ("Exportweltmeister"). No other country invests larger amounts of savings outside its borders. However, Germany plays in the third division when it comes to investment performance, as we show in this paper. We study the returns on German foreign...

In the past decade, Germany has been the world champion in exporting capital ("Exportweltmeister"). No other country invested larger amounts of savings outside its borders. However, we find that Germany plays in the third division when it comes to investment performance. To show this, we...

This paper defines risk-on risk-off (RORO), an elusive terminology in pervasive use, as the variation in global investor risk aversion. Our high-frequency RORO index captures time-varying investor risk appetite across multiple dimensions: advanced economy credit risk, equity market volatility,...

In the past decade, Germany has been the world champion in exporting capital (“Exportweltmeister”). No other country invested larger amounts of savings outside its borders. However, we find that Germany plays in the third division when it comes to investment performance. To show this, we...

Large current account deficits, and the corresponding reliance on capital flows from abroad, can increase a country's vulnerability to periods of heightened risk and uncertainty. This paper develops a framework to evaluate such vulnerabilities. It highlights the central importance of two...

Using formal statistical tests, we detect (i) significant volatility increases for various types of capital flows for a period of changes in business cycle comovement among the G7 countries, and (ii) mixed evidence of changes in covariances and correlations with a set of macroeconomic variables

We study the contraction of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows in the United States during the recent financial crisis and show their unusual non-resiliency, which depends in part on the global nature of the economic recession, but also on the increases in the cost of financing FDI in the...

This article discusses the relation between the balance of payments and the international investment position of countries. It starts with the observation that the net international investment position of many countries is developing independently from their current account balances. This...