The paper starts from the premise that the debate on the ‘new architecture’ of the international financial system should be based on a theory that endogenizes the structure of countries' external liabilities. I present a model in which the maturity of a country's external sovereign debt is...

We examine the short- and long-run effects of financial liberalization on capital markets. To do so, we construct a new comprehensive chronology of financial liberalization in 28 mature and emerging market economies since 1973. We also construct an algorithm to identify booms and busts in stock...

Capital controls lower the variability of the exchange rate and reduce the risk premium as well as the domestic interest rate. On the other hand, capital controls reduce the number of noise traders and, therefore, the risk-bearing capacity of the market, leading to higher interest rates and a...

A Tobin tax (TT) is studied by means of a portfolio model defined over the means and variances of two rates of return (domestic and foreign). When the correlation is negative, the TT is likely to decrease the speculative component of the share of portfolio invested abroad and to increase the...

This paper reexamines the issue of international financial capital mobility, which is today's economic orthodoxy. Discussion is often framed in terms of the impossible trinity. That framing distorts discussion by representing capital mobility as having equal significance with sovereign monetary...

We characterise the probability distributions of various categories of gross capital flows conditional on information contained in financial asset prices in a panel of emerging market economies, with a focus on "tail" events. Our framework, based on the quantile regression methodology, allows...

The increased mobility of capital of the last few decades creates new challenges for the macroeconomic policies of the nation-states. In this paper we analyse some of these challenges. Contrary to what is often alleged, increased capital mobility does not necessarily increase the need for...

We study how investor behavior affects the transmission of financial crises. If investors exhibit decreasing relative risk aversion, then negative wealth shocks increase the risk premium required to hold risky assets. We integrate this into a second generation model of currency crises which...

This paper proposes a model encompassing alternative views of contagion by highlighting the different channels of transmission of financial crises in an unifying framework. We study investor behaviour when they are affected by external habit formation. It is shown how international portfolio...

The adoption of the Tobin tax would be an important political act, a break both with the neo-liberal practices which accompany economic globalisation, and with the fatalism which goes along with them. This idea assumes that the level of co-operation which exists between the nations of the world...