This study assesses the role of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s in the emergence and persistence of the large current account surpluses across non-China emerging Asia, which have been a significant counterpart to the U.S. current account deficit. Using panel data encompassing nearly...

During Apartheid, there was little need for redistributional policies or to borrow for public works since the vast majority of the population was underserved. With the arrival of a representative democracy in 1994, however, South Africa faced a unique problem--providing new and improved public...

During the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, emerging market economies (EMEs) loosened monetary policy considerably to cushion the shock. In previous crises episodes, by contrast, EMEs generally had to tighten monetary policy to defend the value of their currencies, to contain capital flight,...

This paper studies the role of the credit crunch in the severe contraction of trade and economic activity at the height of the 2008-09 global financial crisis, using firm-level data from six emerging market economies in Asia. We construct firm-specific measures of global demand, which allow us...

Many economic models featuring labor supply decision, especially in macroeconomic analysis, assume away heterogeneity in the nature of work, or assume that the nature of work is irrelevant to the labor/leisure choice. This paper studies the macroeconomic implications of relaxing this assumption....

The economic embargo imposed on South Africa between 1985 and 1993 brought the country closer to financial isolation. This paper interprets the imposition and removal of the embargo as financial autarky and financial integration ‘natural experiments’, and studies the effects on the economy....

This paper assesses China's role in Asia as an independent engine of growth, as a conduit of demand from the industrial countries, and as a competitor for export markets. We provide both macroeconomic and microeconomic evidence. The macroeconomic analysis focuses on the impact of U.S. and...

Gali and Gertler (1999) are the first to find that the baseline sticky price model fits the U.S. data well. I examine the robustness of their estimates along two dimensions. First, I show that their IV estimates are not robust to an alternative normalization of the moment condition being...

We present a readily available monthly measure of the intensity of capital controls across 29 emerging market countries that is based on the degree of restrictions on foreign ownership of equities. The initial opening of a market as given by our measure corresponds well with the liberalization...

This paper reports monthly estimates of U.S. cross-border securities positions obtained by combining the (now) annual TIC surveys with monthly transactions data adjusted for various differences in the two reporting standards. Our approach is similar to that of Thomas, Warnock, and Wongswan...