Discussions about international capital movements raise extremely important and controversial questions. Why should countries open up their capital accounts, especially considering that unrestricted international capital movement is a relatively new phenomenon? For example, many OECD countries...

We explore the role of sectoral debt dynamics in shaping business cycles in a sample of 52 Emerging Market Economies (EMEs) and Frontier Market Economies (FMEs) from 2005 to 2021. Higher household debt levels and growth are associated with significantly slower GDP growth in more developed EMEs...

The present paper examines the degree of comovement of gross capital inflows, which is a highly sensitive issue for policy makers. We estimate a dynamic hierarchical factor model that is able to decompose inflows in a sample of 47 economies into (i) a global factor common to all types of flows...

European economic integration is commonly believed to be incomplete, and that further reforms are needed. In this context, the union of U.S. states is considered the benchmark of complete economic integration and is often the basis for comparison regarding the extent of E.U economic integration....

We decompose capital flows -- both debt and equity -- into public and private components and study their relationship with productivity growth. This exercise reveals that international capital flows are mainly shaped by government decisions and sovereign to sovereign transactions. Specifically,...

The balance of payments' financial account aggregates a very heterogeneous set of capital flows. Among other features, these investments differ in terms of maturity, risk, liquidity and receptor. From this viewpoint, this paper analyzes comparatively the behavior of the main components of the...

In this paper, we show that Adam Smith pointed out the existence of the Feldstein-Horioka Paradox or Puzzle and even gave an explanation for it more than 200 years before the publication of Feldstein and Horioka (1980). Smith argues that it is the pursuit of their own security that leads owners...

This paper investigates the factors explaining exchange market pressures (EMP) and the hoarding and use of international reserves (IR) by emerging markets during the 2000s, as the Great Moderation turned to the 2008-9 global crisis and great recession. According to our results, both financial...