The unprecedented increase in non-bank financial intermediation, particularly open-end mutual funds and ETFs, over the last two decades, accounts for nearly half of external financing flows to emerging markets exceeding cross-border lending by global banks. Evidence suggests that investment fund...

When policymakers implement a disinflation program directed at high inflation, the real dollar value of their country's stock market index experiences a cumulative abnormal 12-month return of 48 percent in anticipation of the event. In contrast, the average cumulative abnormal 12-month return...

In the three-year period following stock market liberalizations, the growth rate of the typical firm's capital stock exceeds its pre-liberalization mean by an average of 4.1 percentage points. Cross-sectional changes in investment are significantly correlated with the signals about fundamentals...

When firms from developed markets acquire firms in emerging markets, market-capitalization-weighted monthly joint returns show a statistically significant increase of 1.8%. Panel data estimations suggest that the value gains from cross-border M&A transactions stem from the transfer of majority...

Global risk and risk aversion shocks have distinct distributional impacts on emerging market capital flows and returns. In particular, we find salient consequences of these different global shocks for tail risk in emerging markets. Open-end mutual fund trading provides a key mechanism linking...

In 1985, James A. Baker III's “Program for Sustained Growth” proposed a set of economic policy reforms including, inflation stabilization, trade liberalization, greater openness to foreign investment, and privatization, that he believed would lead to faster growth in countries then known as...

In this paper, we use firm-level data to investigate the link between the marginal product of capital and financial rates of return across countries. Computed estimates from financial statement data show that capital-scarce countries display higher marginal products of capital. However,...

This paper defines risk-on risk-off (RORO), an elusive terminology in pervasive use, as the variation in global investor risk aversion. Our high-frequency RORO index captures time-varying investor risk appetite across multiple dimensions: advanced economy credit risk, equity market volatility,...