Are international borders barriers to capital flows? We use evidence on net capital flows among regions within a country as a benchmark. For this purpose we develop a data set of saving and investment rates of Japanese prefectures. We find that the correlation between saving and investment rates...

While the 2008-2009 financial crisis originated in the United States, we witnessed steep declines in output, consumption and investment of similar magnitudes around the globe. This raises two questions. First, given the observed strong home bias in goods and financial markets, what can account...

Recent episodes (October 2008, May 2010, August 2011) have witnessed huge spikes in equity price risk (implied volatility). Apart from their large size, several features characterize these risk panics. They are global phenomena, shared among a broad set of countries. There is substantial...

Nominal assets play a major role in international financial markets, while trade in indexed bonds is not empirically relevant. As a result, agents are generally exposed to both price and exchange rate uncertainty. Nonetheless, previous research on net capital flows has assumed the presence of a...