This paper documents the dynamic properties of national output, its components, and the current account for five OECD countries. There is strong evidence of conditional volatility for almost all time series as well as significant deviations from normality. The deviations are detected...

The evidence of the last 20 years of recurring output busts and rapid reversals of the current account in emerging markets indicates that domestic agents may not be able to borrow in international capital markets to fully insure themselves against internal and external shocks. This paper models...

Significant nonlinearities are found in several cyclical components macroeconomic time series across countries. Standard equilibrium models of business cycles successfully explain most first and second moments of these time series. Neverthelesss, this paper shows that a model of this class...

This Economic Letter turns to the recent empirical literature to learn more about the potential risks to the U.S. economy of a possible current account reversal and about the factors that are associated with more disruptive corrections.

This Economic Letter presents recent research on a new explanation for both the export of savings and the import of equity by emerging countries: their level of underdevelopment of the financial sector compared to that of more advanced countries. Specifically, financial underdevelopment in...

The remarkable growth of the global salmon aquaculture industry has generated important implications for Alaskan salmon fisheries as increased supplies of farmed product have led to declines in prices of both farmed and wild species. In the particular case of Bristol Bay sockeye salmon, falling...

The composition of capital inflows to emerging market economies tends to follow a predictable dynamic pattern across the business cycle. In most emerging market economies, total inflows are pro-cyclical, with debt and portfolio equity flowing in first, followed later in the expansion by foreign...

Current account crises in emerging markets are characterized by large increases in interest rates, big drops in output, and large real currency depreciations. Current models of crisis with financial frictions do not generate very large movements in these variables. Recent work has shown that the...