Nominal debt provides consumption-smoothing benefits if it can be inflated away during recessions. However, we document empirically that countries with more countercyclical inflation, where nominal debt provides better consumption-smoothing, issue more foreign-currency debt. We propose that...

We survey the literature on global capital allocation. We begin by reviewing the rise of cross-border investment, the shift towards portfolio investment, and the literature focusing on aggregate patterns in multilateral and bilateral positions. We then turn to the recent literature that uses...

This essay considers some prescriptions that are currently popular regarding exchange rate regimes: a general movement toward floating, a general movement toward fixing, or a general movement toward either extreme and away from the middle. The whole spectrum from fixed to floating is covered...

This paper, written for the NBER Conference on the Changing Role of the United States in the World Economy, covers the capital account in the U.S. balance of payments. It first traces the history from 1946 to 1980, a period throughout which Americans were steadily building up a positive net...

This paper makes use of the simulation results of 12 leading large international econometric models, as to the effects of commonly specified changes in monetary and fiscal policy, conducted under the Brookings exercise "Empirical Macroeconomics for Interdependent Economies." The first half of...

By putting together a relatively large data set on bilateral remittances of emigrants, this paper is able to shed light on the important hypothesis of smoothing. The smoothing hypothesis is that remittances are countercyclical with respect to income in the worker's country of origin (the...

The optimal-diversification model of investors' portfolio behavior can give a linear relationship between the exchange risk premium and the conditional exchange rate variance. This note surveys recent empirical work that allows for the conditional variance itself, and therefore the risk premium,...

A majority of countries neither freely float their currencies nor firmly peg. But most of the remainder in practice also don't obey such well-defined intermediate exchange rate regimes as target zones. This paper proposes to define an intermediate regime, to be called "systematic managed...

The existing literature on international macroeconomic policy coordination makes the unrealistic assumption that policy-makers all know the true model, from which it follows in general that the Nash bargaining solution is superior to the Nash non-cooperative solution. But everything changes once...