This paper explores the behavior of daily, international portfolio flows into and out of 46 countries from 1994 through 1998. Our data are from State Street Bank & Trust and encompass over 3 million trades by client institutions. We find a number of interesting facts. First, we detect regional...

Survey data on interest rate expectations are used to separate the forward interest rate into an expected future rate and a term premium. These components are used to test separately two competing alternative hypotheses in tests of the term structure: that the expectations hypothesis does not...

This paper investigates the effects of imperfectly credible trade liberalization programs on welfare and the allocation of real resources. We present a rational expectations model in which a government, with limited access to international financial markets may be forced to abort a...

This paper studies the international experience with securities transaction taxes (STTs), using the Swedish and British systems as case studies. We argue that STTs are best thought of as taxes on different resources used in transactions: domestic brokerage services in the case of Sweden, and...

We compare various forms of market-based debt relief with coordinated debt forgiveness on the part of creditors. These schemes lead to different allocations of resources and levels of debtor and creditor welfare, but all attempt to stimulate debtor investment through reductions in the level of...

The portfolio flows of institutional investors have been found to be highly persistent across countries and individual investment funds. This paper investigates the source of this persistence in emerging market equities. We employ the decomposition methodology of Froot and Tjornhom (2002), which...

Financial instruments whose payoffs are linked to exogenous events, such as the occurrence of a natural catastrophe or an unusual weather pattern depend crucially on actuarial models for determining event (e.g., default) probabilities. In many instances, investors appear to receive premiums far...

This paper provides a simple method to account for heteroskedasticity and cross-sectional dependence in samples with large cross sections and relatively few time-series observations. The method is motivated by cross-sectional regression studies in finance and accounting. Simulation evidence...