The US current account deficit has been persistently large and has brought the country's ratio of foreign debt to GDP to 20%, a figure that is high by historical standards. This paper argues that while US solvency is not a near-term constraint on ongoing deficits, the sheer size of the US...

The intertemporal approach to the current account is often regarded as theoretically elegant but of limited empirical significance. This paper derives highly tractable current account and investment specifications that we estimate without resorting to calibration or simulation methods. In...

One rationale for debt reduction operations under the Brady Plan has been, by alleviating the debt overhang, to improve investment efficiency. Brady-type debt and debt-service reduction (within a strong policy framework, where there is a track record of economic adjustment) has been shown to...

The central claim in this paper is that by explicitly introducing costs of international trade (narrowly, transport costs but more broadly, tariffs, nontariff barriers and other trade costs), one can go far toward explaining a great number of the main empirical puzzles that international...

The literature on capital controls has (at least) four very serious apples-to-oranges problems: (i) There is no unified theoretical framework to analyze the macroeconomic consequences of controls; (ii) there is significant heterogeneity across countries and time in the control measures...