Financial globalization had a rocky start in emerging economies hit by Sudden Stops. Foreign reserves have grown very rapidly since then, as if those countries were practicing a New Mercantilism that views foreign reserves as a war-chest for defense against Sudden Stops. This paper conducts a...

We develop a simple and intuitive approach for analytically deriving unconditionally optimal (UO) policies, a topic of enduring interest in optimal monetary policy analysis. The approach can be employed to both general linear-quadratic problems and to the underlying non-linear environments. We...

Are unregulated capital flows excessive during a stagflation episode? We argue that they likely are, owing to a macroeconomic externality operating through the economy's supply side. Inflows raise domestic wages through a wealth effect on labor supply and cause unwelcome upward pressure on...

Most analyses of the East Asian financial crisis have focused on its causes and the links between currency and banking crises. However a related question is what happens in the aftermath of a crisis? What factors determine the path of an economy in the post-devaluation phase? Does it swiftly...

Credit constraints that link a private agent's debt to market-determined prices create a systemic credit externality that drives a wedge between competitive and (constrained) socially optimal equilibria, which induces private agents to "overborrow". We quantify the effects of this externality in...

During the last two decades, the degree of openness of national financial systems has increased substantially. At the same time, asymmetries in information and other financial market frictions have remain prevalent. We study both empirically and theoretically the implications of the opening up...

This paper introduces Heckscher-Ohlin trade features into a two-country DSGE model, and studies how productivity shocks propagate through trade in goods. In comparison with standard models, (i) transitory shocks to productivity have permanent effects on country-level aggregate variables; (ii)...

A two sector small open economy model developed by Corden (1991, 2002) is used to analyse the impact of sudden stops in capital inflows on an internal and external equilibrium and to explore the merits of disposing of the nominal exchange rate as policy tool in rectifying real exchange rate...

Are unregulated capital flows excessive during a stagflation episode? We argue that they likely are, owing to a macroeconomic externality operating through the economy's supply side. Inflows raise domestic wages through a wealth effect on labor supply and cause unwelcome upward pressure on...

This paper studies the dynamics of external accounts during 278 economic recession events in the past 60 years and sheds light on key factors that shape these patterns. Economic recessions trigger highly-persistent increases in the current account, driven by an initial, sharp decline in...