Switzerland's international investment position shows a puzzling feature since 1999: Large and persistent current account surpluses have failed to boost the value of Swiss foreign assets. In this paper, we link this pattern to the substantial increase in the leveraging of Switzerland's...

Sustained large U.S. current account deficits have led some economists and policymakers to worry that future current account adjustment could occur through a sudden and disruptive depreciation of the dollar and a sharp drop in U.S. consumption. Two factors that, to date, have cast doubt on such...

The Asia crisis was originally expected to affect the U.S. economy adversely, mainly through reduced exports to, and increased imports from, the crisis countries. However, U.S. GDP growth in 1998, at 4.3 percent, was surprisingly strong. This article examines the effect of the crisis on the U.S....

Dramatic changes are occurring in the nature of international trade. Production processes increasingly involve a sequential, vertical trading chain stretching across many countries, with each country specializing in particular stages of a good's production sequence. We document a key aspect of...

The key feature of endogenous growth models is that they imply that permanent changes in government policy can have permanent effects on growth rates. In this paper, we develop and implement an empirical framework to test this implication. In a regression of growth rates on current and lagged...

Language is a fundamental tool for communication of ideas between people, and so is an essential input into production and trade. In general, a society will possess more production and consumption opportunities when all its members share a common language. Neighboring societies and communities...