Our study complements existing studies of the degree of capital mobility based on an examination of explicit capital controls (e.g. Miniane 2004), the quantity of capital flows (Obstfeld & Taylor 2004), the relationship between investment and savings (e.g. Feldstein & Horioka 1980), cross...

Theory predicts that capital should flow to countries where economic growth and the return to capital is highest. However, in the post-World War II period, per-capita GDP grew almost three times faster in East Asia than in Latin America, yet capital flowed in greater quantities into Latin...

From the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, per-capita GDP in the economies of East Asia grew almost three times as fast as in the economies of Latin America. Specifically, in 1950, the economies of the Asian Tigers (Japan, South Korea, Singapore and...

Does capital flow to locations with a relatively high rate of return? We address this question by constructing a panel database of over 100 countries between 1950 and 2005, accounting for about 99 percent of world real income in 2005. With these data, we construct two measures of the rate of...

This paper uses a new dataset to study the relationship between economic output and sovereign default for the period 1820-2004. We fi?nd a negative but surprisingly weak relationship between output and default. Throughout history, countries have indeed defaulted during bad times (when output was...

Negotiations between a country in default and its international creditors are modeled as a dynamic game in an environment of weak contractual enforcement. The country cannot borrow internation- ally until it settles with all creditors. Delay arises in equilibrium as creditors engage in strategic...

Why do growth and net exit rates of establishments decline with size? What determines the size distribution of establishments? This paper presents a theory of establishment dynamics that simultaneously rationalizes the basic facts on economy-wide establishment growth, net exit, and size...

What has been the effect of the shift in emerging market capital flows toward private sector borrowers? Are emerging markets capital flows more efficient? If not, can controls on capital flows improve welfare? This paper studies these questions in a world with two forms of default risk. When...