Financially closed economies insure themselves against current-account shocks using international reserves. We characterize the optimal management of reserves using an open-economy model of precautionary savings and emphasize several results. First, the welfare-based opportunity cost of reserves...

This paper explores the relationship between equity prices and the current account for 17 industrialized countries in the period 1980 - 2007. Based on a panel vector autoregression, I compare the effects of equity price shocks to those originating from monetary policy and exchange rates. While...

This paper explores the relation between stock prices and the current account for 17 OECD countries in 1980-2007. I use a panel vector autoregression (VAR) to compare the effects of stock price shocks to those originating from monetary policy and exchange rates. While monetary policy shocks have...

The intertemporal current account approach predicts that the current account of a small open economy is independent of global shocks, and that responses of the current account to country-specific shocks depend on the persistence of the shocks. This paper shows that these predictions impose...

This paper explores the effect of news shocks on the current account and other macroeconomic variables using worldwide giant oil discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output - the delay between a discovery and production is on average 4 to 6 years. We first...

The intertemporal current account approach predicts that the current account of a small open economy is independent of global shocks, and that responses of the current account to country-specific shocks depend on the persistence of the shocks. This paper shows that these predictions impose...

This paper tests a model of the role of stock markets in current account dynamics, developed in a companion paper. With U.S. data, the model performs better than the same model without stock markets. An insight given by the model is that the current account might help predict future stock market...