This paper empirically investigates international equity investors' foreign portfolios before and during the financial crisis by estimating a gravity model for 22 source and 42 destination countries during 2001–2009. The results show a significant negative relationship between foreign equity...

This paper studies the international transmission of pledgeability shocks, as the recent crisis involved a negative shock to the pledgeability of assets. The paper develops a two-country portfolio model, with leveraged investors, that incorporates this type of shock and a solution approach for...

The structure of a country’s external liabilities, as well as the extent and nature of its international financial integration are key determinants of its vulnerability to financial crises. This is confirmed by new empirical analysis covering OECD and emerging economies over the past four...

This paper examines the relative importance of the global and regional markets for financial markets in developing countries, particularly during the US financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis. Specifically, we examine the way in which the degree of regional (seven African...

Does opening up capital markets facilitate risk diversification across borders? Are all countries gradually better off in the process of international financial integration? This paper explores welfare implications for various countries in a center-periphery framework with endogenous portfolio...

Using unique data on mutual fund portfolios with different investment scopes, we study the extent of international diversification. Mutual funds invest in a surprisingly limited number of stocks—about 100. The number of holdings from a given region declines as the investment scope broadens....

Using data for 48 advanced and emerging market economies during 1985–2008, this paper examines the impact of measures of financial integration and globalization on several dimensions of real activity. We find that both advances in financial integration and globalization are associated with...

Measures of de facto capital account openness for China and India raise the question whether the Chinn-Ito measure of de jure capital account openness is useful and whether the Lane-Milesi-Ferretti measure of de facto openness ranks the two countries correctly. We examine eight dimensions of de...

Most studies of international financial openness and crises link economic performance to either the net inflow of capital or the gross inflow (outflow) defined as the change in foreign (domestic) holdings of domestic (foreign) assets over a period. In this paper we decompose the net inflow into...

We show that in recent years global factor models have been catching up significantly with their local counterparts in terms of explanatory power (R2) for international stock returns. This catch-up is driven by a rise in global factor betas, not a rise in factor volatilities, suggesting that the...