This paper defines risk-on risk-off (RORO), an elusive terminology in pervasive use, as the variation in global investor risk aversion. Our high-frequency RORO index captures time-varying investor risk appetite across multiple dimensions: advanced economy credit risk, equity market volatility,...

Global risk and risk aversion shocks have distinct distributional impacts on emerging market capital flows and returns. In particular, we find salient consequences of these different global shocks for tail risk in emerging markets. Open-end mutual fund trading provides a key mechanism linking...

Over the last two decades, the unprecedented increase in non-bank financial intermediation, particularly open-end mutual funds and ETFs, accounts for nearly half of the external financing flows to emerging markets exceeding cross-border lending by global banks. Evidence suggests that investment...