The authors address the trading strategies of mutual funds in emerging markets. The data set they develop permits analyses of these strategies at the level of individual portfolios. A methodologically novel feature of their analysis: they disentangle the behavior of fund managers from that of...

International mutual funds are one of the main channels for capital flows to emerging economies. Although mutual funds have become important contributors to financial market integration, little is known about their investment allocation, and strategies. The authors provide an overview of mutual...

The authors study whether capital controls affect the link between domestic and foreign stock market prices and interest rates. To examine the characteristics of international market integration and the effects of capital controls in the short and long run, they apply band-pass filter techniques...

Financial market instability has been the focus of attention of both academic and policy circles. Rating agencies have been under particular scrutiny lately as promoters of financial excesses, upgrading countries in good times and downgrading them in bad times. Using a panel of emerging...

The authors examine the short- and long-run effects of financial liberalization on capital markets. To do so, they construct a new comprehensive chronology of financial liberalization in 28 developed and emerging economies since 1973. The authors also construct an algorithm to identify booms and...

Using non-linear methods, this paper finds that existing estimates of government spending multipliers in expansion and recession may yield biased results by ignoring whether government spending is increasing or decreasing. For industrial countries, the problem originates in the fact that,...

A large literature has argued that different types of capital flows have different consequences for macroeconomic stability. By distinguishing between foreign direct investment and portfolio and other investments, this paper studies the effects of the composition of capital inflows on output...

Using a new, large data set on quarterly reserve requirements for the period 1970-2011, this paper provides new evidence on the use of reserve requirements as a countercyclical macroprudential tool in developing countries. The appeal of reserve requirements lies in the pro-cyclical behavior of...

China's lending boom to developing countries is morphing into defaults and debt distress. Given the secrecy surrounding China's loans, also the associated defaults remain "hidden”, as missed payments and restructuring details are not disclosed. This paper constructs an encompassing dataset of...

This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. It compiles a new database of 266,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) and 2016, covering up to 91 countries. The main insight is that, as in...