Germany has had a large and persistent current account surplus for the past almost two decades. We review different theoretical explanations of this phenomenon and conclude from the empirical litera-ture that Germany's external surplus reflects an imbalance that is a threat to macroeconomic...

I develop an asymmetric two-country incomplete markets model in which economies trade final consumption goods and inputs. The purchases of imported inputs from the firms of one of the economies (the emerging) to the firms of the other economy (the advanced) are subject to a foreign currency...

Although the role of gold in the world economy has declined since the gold standard was abandoned, it remains important as a central bank reserve, a hedge against risks, a barometer of geopolitical uncertainty, and an input for jewelry. While portfolio demand for gold has been well studied,...

This paper analyzes recent changes in the relative importance of the determinants of capital flows to emerging market economies. For this purpose, we estimate vector autoregressive (VAR) models for the period 2009-2020. Based on these models, we estimate the effects on debt flows from shocks to...

International financial integration has greatly increased the scope for changes in a country's net foreign asset position through the valuation channel of external adjustment, namely capital gains and losses on the country's external assets and liabilities. We examine this valuation channel...

India embarked on reintegration with the world econ- omy in the early 1990s. At first, a certain limited open- ing took place emphasising equity flows by certain kinds of foreign investors. This opening has had myriad in- teresting implications in terms of both microeconomics and macroeconomics....

The life-cycle consumption and permanent income hypotheses predict that if workers face greater likelihood of unemployment in the future that lowers expected future income, they will save more today. In this paper, we test this hypothesis by looking at the expenditure response of workers to the...

Housing is the greatest asset held by most households, and it is an important determinant of their financing and consumption decisions. Despite the fact that measuring housing wealth is crucial for understanding households' economic behavior, this indicator is currently unavailable in Mexico due...

This paper develops a comprehensive measure of household economic well-being. The "sustainable consumption" concept accounts for income, assets, debt, transfer payments, and asset returns to estimate a consumption path that balances resources with expenditure over a household's lifetime....

This paper employs a calibrated model of the US economy to analyze the boom and bust in house prices as well as the shifts in the distribution of wealth during the years around the Great Recession. We replicate the dynamics of the housing market using shocks to aggregate income, the distribution...