What are the economic mechanisms that account for sudden growth spurts? Are these mechanisms similar across episodes? Focusing on the economic resurgence of the BRICs over the last decade, we employ the Business Cycle Accounting methodology developed by Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2007) to...

Economic theory suggests that the magnitude and direction of a company's currency risk exposure depends crucially on its fundamental involvement in international trade. For U.S. industries, we find that the stock performance of import-oriented companies moves positively with the performance of...

We investigate the misallocation of credit in Japan associated with banks' evergreening loans, distinguishing between two types of firm distress: (perhaps temporary) financial distress and technical distress, which reflects weak operational capabilities, as indicated by low total factor...

An influential explanation for the recent rise in the U.S. current account deficit is the boom in U.S. productivity. As U.S. productivity surged in the mid-1990s, capital was attracted to the U.S. to take advantage of the higher real returns. Using a two country general equilibrium model, this...

Does increased international liquidity, the saving glut explain the recent deterioration of US current account balances? In this paper, we develop a simple, two country real business cycle model to answer this question. The salient feature of our model is that lending by one country is...

In contrast to the literature involving U.S. bank domestic lending, we find that mutual funds affiliated with lending banks reduce their equity investment and turnover in the non-U.S. listed stock of their non-U.S. borrowers compared to non-lending banks or unaffiliated mutual funds. Reduced...

In contrast to the literature involving U.S. bank lending domestically to U.S. firms, we find that affiliated U.S. banks' mutual funds do not increase their holdings of equity in non-U.S. borrowing firms around new loan initiations. Mutual funds affiliated with lending banks have less equity...

We apply the Business Cycle Accounting methodology developed by Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2007) to study the economic resurgence of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) over the last decade. We document that while efficiency wedges do contribute in a large part to growth, especially in...

Using an unique, cross-country survey conducted by the World Bank, we document that women are under-represented in financial markets, with significantly less number of women having financial accounts as compared to men. Often, family reliance is a major reason for not having an account....