After peaking in the first half of 2008, international imbalances declined sharply during the global crisis of 2008-09, in part reflecting cyclical factors such as large contractions in domestic demand on the back of bursting housing bubbles in a number of deficit countries, as well as large...

The paper offers an empirical taxonomy of the factors driving China's current account. A simple present-value model with non-tradeable goods explains more than 70 percent of current account variability over the period 1982–2007, including the persistent surpluses since 2001. It also correctly...

U.S. equity outperformance and sustained dollar appreciation have led to large valuation gains for the rest of the world on the U.S. external position. The author constructs their global distribution, carefully accounting for the role of tax havens. Valuation gains are concentrated and large in...

This paper analyses the role of asset prices in comparison to other factors, in particular exchange rates, as a driver of the US trade balance. It employs a Bayesian structural VAR model that requires imposing only a minimum of economically meaningful sign restrictions. We find that equity...

We model capital flows among Chinese provinces using a theory-based variance decomposition that allows us to gauge the importance of various channels of external adjustments at the regional level: variation in intertemporal prices—domestic and international interest rates and the real exchange...

The paper offers an empirical taxonomy of the factors driving China's current account. A simple present-value model with non-tradeable goods explains more than 70 percent of current account variability over the period 1982-2007, including the persistent surpluses since 2001. Expected increases...

We explore empirically how capital inflows into the US and financial deregulation within the United States interacted in driving the run-up (and subsequent decline) in US housing prices over the period 1990-2010. To obtain an ex ante measure of financial liberalization, we focus on the history...

Great attention is now being paid to global imbalances, the growing U.S. current account deficit financed by growing surpluses in the rest of the world. How can the issue be understood in a more historical perspective? We seek a meaningful comparison between the two eras of globalization:...