The potential for economic agents to minimize risk through diversification is central to the study of finance. This dissertation analyzes the ability to diversify risks in an international context by studying risk sharing opportunities on two dimensions, consumption growth and portfolio wealth....

Traditional time series or cross-sectional regression procedures yield mixed evidence on maintained hypotheses about the determinants of international equity returns. This paper re-examines how three theory-suggested factors affect equity returns and how the test results may differ between...

This Article, a sequel to earlier articles by the author on financial regulation and global finance, retrieves and updates J. M. Keynes’s original International Clearing Union plan for what ultimately became the International Monetary Fund (“IMF,” “Fund”).  Its motives are not...

When the U.S. runs a trade deficit with the Chinese, this requires a capital inflow from China to the United States. This, in turn, lowers U.S. interest rates and increases U.S. investment spending. On the negative side, lower priced goods from China may hurt U.S. industries that compete with...

This paper studies the famous Feldstein and Horioka finding, which is a high correla-tion between long period averages of savings rates and investment rates across countries. We first confirm the Feldstein-Horioka finding with a more recent data set, and then show that a calibrated complete...

This dissertation studies the roles that durable goods play in open economy macroeconomics. The three essays examine if and how durable goods improve the ability to understand business cycle features.The first essay shows how investment behavior and international risk sharing, two business cycle...

Firms and investors often operate in environments with market imperfections and agency frictions. It is common wisdom that the effects of these microeconomic frictions are amplifed or mitigated by the quality of economic institutions in a country. Yet little is known about the precise channels...

This paper investigates the impact of European Union membership on Baltic investors' ability to diversify. The research addresses the impact of E.U. membership on effectiveness of country-based diversificatin versus industry-based diversification strategies for Latvian investors. I compared...

The world has entered a global recession that is causing widespread business contraction, increases in unemployment, and shrinking government revenues. The process for coping with the crisis by countries across the globe has been manifest in four basic phases. The first has been intervention to...