Switzerland's international investment position shows a puzzling feature since 1999: Large and persistent current account surpluses have failed to boost the value of Swiss foreign assets. In this paper, we link this pattern to the substantial increase in the leveraging of Switzerland's...

International linkages of national capital markets have strengthened in recent years, as many nations have relaxed restrictions over their financial markets and as technical advances have speeded communications. While some controls over capital movements remain, the degree of integration is...

This paper investigates the impact of globalization on productivity growth and the procyclicality of productivity growth in manufacturing industries in the United States and Germany. For U.S. industries, the analysis suggests that changes in international demand affect productivity growth...

This paper analyzes movements in the U.S. external imbalance over the 1980s from the perspective of the capital account. It considers the empirical evidence on two competing hypotheses about the causes of the large and persistent net capital inflow during the decade: one that the capital inflow...

We show a statistically significant and economically relevant effect of open capital accounts on financial deepness and economic growth in a cross-section of countries over the period 1986 to 1995. Countries with open capital accounts over some or all of this period had a significantly greater...