"The dramatic increase in gross stock of foreign assets and liability has revived interest in the portfolio balance theory of international investment. Evidence on the validity of this theory has always been scarce and inconclusive. The current paper derives testable empirical implications from...

We model the motives for residents of a country to hold foreign assets, including the precautionary motive that has been omitted from much previous literature as intractable. Our model captures many of the principal insights from the existing specialized literature on the precautionary motive,...