Recent evidence from developing and emerging economies shows a negative correlation between growth and net capital inflows, a contradiction to neoclassical growth theory. I provide updated and disaggregated evidence on the origins of this puzzle. An analysis of the components of capital flows...

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates the return on investments of foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinational companies over the period 1982-2006 averaged 9.4 percent annually after taxes; U.S. subsidiaries of foreign multinationals averaged only 3.2 percent. Two factors distort...

This paper investigates how oil price shocks affect the trade balance and terms of trade in a two country DSGE model. We show that the response of the external sector depends critically on the structure of financial market risk-sharing. Under incomplete markets, higher oil prices reduce the...

The business cycles of advanced economies are synchronized. Standard macro models fail to explain that fact. This paper presents a simple model of a two-country, two-traded good, complete-financial-markets world in which country-specific productivity shocks generate business cycles that are...

An unresolved issue in international macroeconomics is the apparent lack of risk-sharing across countries, which contradicts the prediction of models based on the assumption of complete markets. We assess the importance of financial frictions in this issue by constructing an incomplete market...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the medium-term determinants of current accounts for a large sample of industrial and developing countries, utilizing an approach that highlights macroeconomic determinants of longer-term saving and investment balances. Cross section and panel...

The acceleration in the formation of global imbalances in the period preceding the last financial crisis prompted a revival of the debate on whether exchange rate regimes affect the flexibility of the current account (ie its degree of mean reversion), as originally proposed by Friedman (1953). I...

This paper assesses the impact of both monetary and fiscal policy along with other macroeconomic determinants on economic activity using state-level Indian data. Since economic activity can vary across states due to local factors and state government policies, a state-level empirical analysis,...

A view receiving increased support is that the height of trade costs in prime export sectorshas a strong effect on current account balances: countries specializing in sectors that facerelatively high trade costs, such as services, tend to run current account deficits, andsimilarly, countries...

This chapter is structured in three parts. The first part outlines the methodological steps, involving both theoretical and empirical work, for assessing whether an observed allocation of resources across countries is efficient. The second part applies the methodology to the long-run allocation...