Financial globalization was off to a rocky start in emerging economies hit by Sudden Stops in the 1990s. The surge in foreign reserves since then is viewed as a New Merchantilism in which reserves are a war-chest for defense against Sudden Stops. We conduct a quantitative assessment of this...

An implication of the ""globalization hazard"" hypothesis is that sudden stops could be prevented by offering foreign investors price guarantees on emerging markets assets. These guarantees create a tradeoff, however, because they weaken globalization hazard by creating international moral...

Uncertainty about the riskiness of new financial products was an important factor behind the U.S. credit crisis. We show that a boom-bust cycle in debt, asset prices and consumption characterizes the equilibrium dynamics of a model with a collateral constraint in which agents learn ""by...

Theory predicts that a nation''s stochastic intertemporal budget constraint is satisfied if net exports (NX) and net foreign assets (NFA) satisfy an error-correction specification with a residual integrated of any finite order. We test this hypothesis using data for 21 industrial and 29 emerging...

This paper studies overborrowing, financial crises and macro-prudential policy in an equilibrium model of business cycles and asset prices with collateral constraints. Agents in a decentralized competitive equilibrium do not internalize the negative effects of asset fire-sales on the value of...

This paper looks at fiscal solvency and public debt sustainability in both emerging market and advanced countries. Evidence of fiscal solvency, in the form of a robust positive conditional relationship between public debt and the primary fiscal balance, is established in both groups of...

This paper shows that the dominant view that the high variability of real exchange rates is due to movements in exchange rate-adjusted prices of tradable goods does not hold for Mexican data for periods with a managed exchange rate. The relative price of nontradables accounts for up to 70...

The performance of macroeconomic indicators of capital mobility is examined in the context of an intertemporal equilibrium model of a small open economy. Recursive numerical solution methods are used to compute measures of consumption smoothing, savings-investment correlation, and the...

A three-good, stochastic intertemporal equilibrium model of a small open economy is used to examine the link between terms of trade and business cycles. Equilibrium co-movements of model economies representing industrial and developing countries are computed and compared with the stylized facts...

Legal restrictions governing financial transactions in Chile have produced a system in which most financial assets are either 30-day non-indexed assets or 90-day indexed assets. This paper analyzes data on the rates of return of these assets to determine the extent to which efficient arbitrage...