Using bilateral capital flows data from 10 advanced reporting economies — with over 186 bilateral country pairs — for 2000 to 2016, this paper provides strong evidence on the significance of gravity factors, including distance and bilateral trade ties, in explaining cross-border financial...

This paper studies how investors allocate their portfolio equity investment internationally. I develop a model to formalize the mechanism by which investors extract the information about foreign target countries from foreign direct investment (FDI): When investors make FDI, due to their control...

This report discusses key issues around the mobilization of private capital for development. Investment requirements are huge, especially for infrastructure, climate and other SDG-related investments. External finance for developing countries stagnated in the years before the pandemic, followed...

We survey several key mechanisms that explain the composition of international capital flows: foreign direct investment, foreign portfolio investment and debt flows (bank loans and bonds). In particular, we focus on the following market frictions: asymmetric information in capital markets and...

This study employs bilateral data on external assets to examine the impact of climate policies on the reallocation of international capital. We find that the stringency of climate policy in the destination country is significantly and positively associated with an increase in the allocation of...

In this paper I explore the role of portfolio diversification in explaining the distribution of foreign investment across countries. I capture the portfolio diversification motive by a measure of country-specific riskiness, “covariance risk,” which I construct as how countries' growth rates...