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Boom-Bust Capital Flow Cycles
Graciela Laura Kaminsky
This article examines the new trends in research on capital flows fueled by the 2007–2009 Global Crisis. Previous studies on capital flows focused on current account imbalances and net capital flows. The Global Crisis changed that. The onset of this crisis was preceded by a dramatic increase in gross financial flows while net capital flows remained mostly subdued. The attention in academia zoomed in on gross inflows and outflows with special attention to cross-border banking flows before the crisis erupted and the shift towards corporate bond issuance in its aftermath. The boom and bust in capital flows around the Global Crisis also stimulated a new area of research: capturing the "global factor." This research adopts two different approaches. The traditional literature on the push–pull factors, which before the crisis was mostly focused on monetary policy in the financial center as the "push factor," started to explore what other factors contribute to the co-movement of capital flows as well as to amplify the role of monetary policy in the financial center on capital flows. This new research focuses on global banks' leverage, risk appetite, and global uncertainty. Since the "global factor" is not known, a second branch of the literature has captured this factor indirectly using dynamic common factors extracted from actual capital flows or movements in asset prices.
Capital Controls: A Survey of the New Literature
Alessandro Rebucci and Chang Ma
This paper reviews selected post–Global Financial Crisis theoretical and empirical contributions on capital controls and identifies three theoretical motives for the use of capital controls: pecuniary externalities in models of financial crises, aggregate demand externalities in New Keynesian models of the business cycle, and terms of trade manipulation in open-economy models with pricing power. Pecuniary and demand externalities offer the most compelling case for the adoption of capital controls, but macroprudential policy can also address the same distortions. So capital controls generally are not the only instrument that can do the job. If evaluated through the lenses of the new theories, the empirical evidence reviewed suggests that capital controls can have the intended effects, even though the extant literature is inconclusive as to whether the effects documented amount to a net gain or loss in welfare terms. Terms of trade manipulation also provides a clear-cut theoretical case for the use of capital controls, but this motive is less compelling because of the spillover and coordination issues inherent in the use of control on capital flows for this purpose. Perhaps not surprisingly, only a handful of countries have used capital controls in a countercyclical manner, while many adopted macroprudential policies. This suggests that capital control policy might entail additional costs other than increased financing costs, such as signaling the bad quality of future policies, leakages, and spillovers.
Comparative Advantage in Contemporary Trade Models
Peter M. Morrow
Models of comparative advantage in international trade explain specialization using differences in autarky relative prices. This literature has traditionally focused on the Heckscher–Ohlin and Ricardian models. The former emphasizes differences in factor abundance across countries and in factor intensity across goods; the latter focuses on relative productivity differences across countries and goods. However, unrealistic assumptions and stark assumptions have hindered empirical assessment of these models. Contemporary models now allow researchers to overcome these hurdles. New models of Ricardian comparative advantage incorporate realistic geography and multiple countries. Similar advances have freed the Heckscher–Ohlin model from some of its theoretical straightjackets. In addition, researchers have started to provide microfoundations for the Ricardian model and to formalize how institutions and factor market distortions might generate patterns of comparative advantage. Trade economists have also started to think about magnitudes in a different way; that is, through general equilibrium counterfactual experiments.
Corporate Takeovers and Non-Financial Stakeholders
Daniel Greene, Omesh Kini, Mo Shen, and Jaideep Shenoy
A large body of work has examined the impact of corporate takeovers on the financial stakeholders (shareholders and bondholders) of the merging firms. Since the late 2000s, empirical research has increasingly highlighted the crucial role played by the non-financial stakeholders (labor, suppliers, customers, government, and communities) in these transactions. It is, therefore, important to understand the interplay between corporate takeovers and the non-financial stakeholders of the firm. Financial economists have long viewed the firm as a nexus of contracts between various stakeholders connected to the firm. Corporate takeovers not only play an important role in redefining the broad boundaries of the firm but also result in major changes to corporate ownership and structure. In the process, takeovers can significantly alter the contractual relationships with non-financial stakeholders. Because the firm's relationships with these stakeholders are governed by implicit and explicit contracts, circumstances can arise that allow acquiring firms to fully or partially abrogate these contracts and extract rents from non-financial stakeholders after deal completion. In contrast, non-financial stakeholders can also potentially benefit from a takeover if they get to share in any efficiency gains that are generated in the deal. Given this framework, the ex-ante importance of these contractual relationships can have a bearing on the efficacy of takeovers. The ability to alter contractual relationships ex post can affect the propensity of a takeover and merging firms' shareholders and, in turn, impact non-financial stakeholders. Non-financial stakeholders will be more vested in post-takeover success if they can trust the acquiring firm to not take actions that are detrimental to them. The big picture that emerges from the surveyed literature is that non-financial stakeholder considerations affect takeover decisions and post-takeover outcomes. Moreover, takeovers also have an impact on non-financial stakeholders. The directions of all these effects, however, depend on the economic environment in which the merging firms operate.
Economic Geography and Trade
Anthony J. Venables
Economic activity is unevenly distributed across space, both internationally and within countries. What determines this spatial distribution, and how is it shaped by trade? Classical trade theory gives the insights of comparative advantage and gains from trade but is firmly aspatial, modeling countries as points and trade (in goods and factors of production) as either perfectly frictionless or impossible. Modern theory places this in a spatial context in which geographical considerations influence the volume of trade between places. Gravity models tell us that distance is important, with each doubling of distance between places halving the volume of trade. Modeling the location decisions of firms gives a theory of location of activity based on factor costs (as in classical theory) and also on proximity to markets, proximity to suppliers, and the extent of competition in each market. It follows from this that—if there is a high degree of mobility—firms and economic activity as a whole may tend to cluster, providing an explanation of observed spatial unevenness. In some circumstances falling trade barriers may trigger the deindustrialization of some areas as activity clusters in fewer places. In other circumstances falling barriers may enable activity to spread out, reducing inequalities within and between countries. Research over the past several decades has established the mechanisms that cause these changes and placed them in full general equilibrium models of the economy. Empirical work has quantified many of the important relationships. However, geography and trade remains an area where progress is needed to develop robust tools that can be used to inform place-based policies (concerning trade, transport, infrastructure, and local economic development), particularly in view of the huge expenditures that such policies incur.
The Economics of Diet and Obesity: Public Policy
Fabrice Etilé
The rise in obesity and other food-related chronic diseases has prompted public-health officials of local communities, national governments, and international institutions to pay attention to the regulation of food supply and consumer behavior. A wide range of policy interventions has been proposed and tested since the early 21st century in various countries. The most prominent are food taxation, health education, nutritional labeling, behavioral interventions at point-of-decision, advertising, and regulations of food quality and trade. While the standard neoclassical approach to consumer rationality provides limited arguments in favor of public regulations, the recent development of behavioral economics research extends the scope of regulation to many marketing practices of the food industry. In addition, behavioral economics provides arguments in favor of taxation, easy-to-use front-of-pack labels, and the use of nudges for altering consumer choices. A selective but careful review of the empirical literature on taxation, labeling, and nudges suggests that a policy mixing these tools may produce some health benefits. More specifically, soft-drink taxation, front-of-pack labeling policies, regulations of marketing practices, and eating nudges based on affect or behavior manipulations are often effective methods for reducing unhealthy eating. The economic research faces important challenges. First, the lack of a proper control group and exogenous sources of variations in policy variables make evaluation very difficult. Identification is challenging as well, with data covering short time periods over which markets are observed around slowly moving equilibria. In addition, truly exogenous supply or demand shocks are rare events. Second, structural models of consumer choices cannot provide accurate assessment of the welfare benefits of public policies because they consider perfectly rational agents and often ignore the dynamic aspects of food decisions, especially consumer concerns over health. Being able to obtain better welfare evaluation of policies is a priority. Third, there is a lack of research on the food industry response to public policies. Some studies implement empirical industrial organization models to infer the industry strategic reactions from market data. A fruitful avenue is to extend this approach to analyze other key dimensions of industrial strategies, especially decisions regarding the nutritional quality of food. Finally, the implementation of nutritional policies yields systemic consequences that may be underestimated. They give rise to conflicts between public health and trade objectives and alter the business models of the food sector. This may greatly limit the external validity of ex-ante empirical approaches. Future works may benefit from household-, firm-, and product-level data collected in rapidly developing economies where food markets are characterized by rapid transitions, the supply is often more volatile, and exogenous shocks occur more frequently.
The Economics of Diet and Obesity: Understanding the Global Trends
Fabrice Etilé and Lisa Oberlander
In the last several decades obesity rates have risen significantly. In 2014, 10.8% and 14.9% of the world's men and women, respectively, were obese as compared with 3.2% and 6.4% in 1975. The obesity "epidemic" has spread from high-income countries to emerging and developing ones in every region of the world. The rising obesity rates are essentially explained by a rise in total calorie intake associated with long-term global changes in the food supply. Food has become more abundant, available, and cheaper, but food affluence is associated with profound changes in the nutritional quality of supply. While calories have become richer in fats, sugar, and sodium, they are now lower in fiber. The nutrition transition from starvation to abundance and high-fat/sugar/salt food is thus accompanied by an epidemiological transition from infectious diseases and premature death to chronic diseases and longer lives. Food-related chronic diseases have important economic consequences in terms of human capital and medical care costs borne by public and private insurances and health systems. Technological innovations, trade globalization, and retailing expansion are associated with these substantial changes in the quantity and quality of food supply and diet in developed as well as in emerging and rapidly growing economies. Food variety has significantly increased due to innovations in the food production process. Raw food is broken down to obtain elementary substances that are subsequently assembled for producing final food products. This new approach, as well as improvements in cold chain and packaging, has contributed to a globalization of food chains and spurred an increase of trade in food products, which, jointly with foreign direct investments, alters the domestic food supply. Finally, technological advancements have also favored the emergence of large supermarkets and retailers, which have transformed the industrial organization of consumer markets. How do these developments affect population diets and diet-related diseases? Identifying the contribution of supply factors to long-term changes in diet and obesity is important because it can help to design innovative, effective, and evidence-based policies, such as regulations on trade, retailing, and quality or incentives for product reformulation. Yet this requires a correct evaluation of the importance and causal effects of supply-side factors on the obesity pandemic. Among others, the economic literature analyzes the effect of changes in food prices, food availability, trade, and marketing on the nutrition and epidemiological transitions. There is a lack of causal robust evidence on their long-term effects. The empirical identification of causal effects is de facto challenging because the dynamics of food supply is partly driven by demand-side factors and dynamics, like a growing female labor force, habit formation, and the social dynamics of preferences. There are several important limitations to the literature from the early 21st century. Existing studies cover mostly well-developed countries, use static economic and econometric specifications, and employ data that cover short periods of time unmarked by profound shifts in food supply. In contrast, empirical research on the long-term dynamics of consumer behavior is much more limited, and comparative studies across diverse cultural and institutional backgrounds are almost nonexistent. Studies on consumers in emerging countries could exploit the rapid time changes and large spatial heterogeneity, both to identify the causal impacts of shocks on supply factors and to document how local culture and institutions shape diet and nutritional outcomes.
European Trade Policy in the 19th Century
Markus Lampe
Trade policy is one determining factor of 19th-century globalization, alongside transport and communication innovations and broader institutional changes that made worldwide commodity and factor flows possible. Four broad periods, or trade policy regimes, can be discerned at the European level. The first starts at the end of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that had led to many disruptions in trade relations. Governments tried to recover from the financial impact of the wars and to mitigate the adjustment shocks to domestic producers that came with the end of the wars. Very restrictive trade policies were thus adopted in most places and only slowly dismantled over the following decades as some of the welfare costs of, for example, agricultural protection became evident. The second period dated from the mid-1840s, which saw the liberalization of protective grain tariffs in many European countries, to the mid-1870s, when trade liberalization reached its maximum. This period witnessed unilateral trade liberalizations, but is most famous for the spread of a network of bilateral trade agreements across Europe in the wake of the Cobden–Chevalier treaty between France and the United Kingdom in 1860. From the 1870s, industrial and commercial crises and falling prices in agriculture due to global market integration led governments to search for solutions to these policy challenges. Many European countries thus increased protection for agriculture and manufactured goods in which domestic import-competing producers struggled. At the same time, demands for renegotiations threatened the treaty network, and lapsing agreements were only provisionally prolonged. From the late 1880s, the struggle between protection for import-competing producers and market access abroad for export-oriented producers led to internal and external conflicts over trade policy in many countries, including trade (or tariff) "wars." A renewed network of less ambitious trade treaties than those of the 1860s restored a fragile equilibrium from the early 1890s, to be renewed and renegotiated roughly every 12 years as treaties approached their expiration date. When looking at the country and commodity level it can easily be appreciated that the more or less common shifts during these periods at the European level were more pronounced in some countries than in others. For example, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium shifted more decisively to free trade and remained there, while liberalization was much less pronounced and more decisively undone in Portugal, Spain, Russia, and the Habsburg monarchy. The experiences of the Scandinavian countries, Germany, and France lie somewhere in between. Turkey and the countries that gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century started as (forced) free traders and from the 1880s increased their duties, in part to meet growing fiscal demands. At the commodity level, tariffs on raw materials remained generally low and did not follow the protectionist backlash that affected foodstuffs. One exception was (initially) "tropical" goods such as sugar, coffee, tea, and tobacco, where many countries levied high tariffs to extract fiscal revenue. For manufactured goods, liberalization and protectionist backlash were milder than in agriculture, although there are many exceptions to this rule.
Exchange Rates, Interest Parity, and the Carry Trade
Craig Burnside
The uncovered interest parity (UIP) condition states that the interest rate differential between two currencies is the expected rate of change of their exchange rate. Empirically, however, in the 1976–2018 period, exchange rate changes were approximately unpredictable over short horizons, with a slight tendency for currencies with higher interest rates to appreciate against currencies with lower interest rates. If the UIP condition held exactly, carry trades, in which investors borrow low interest rate currencies and lend high interest rate currencies, would earn zero average profits. The fact that UIP is violated, therefore, is a necessary condition to explain the fact that carry trades earned significantly positive profits in the 1976–2018 period. A large literature has documented the failure of UIP, as well as the profitability of carry trades, and is surveyed here. Additionally, summary evidence is provided here for the G10 currencies. This evidence shows that carry trades have been significantly less profitable since 2007–2008, and that there was an apparent structural break in exchange rate predictability around the same time. A large theoretical literature explores economic explanations of this phenomenon and is briefly surveyed here. Prominent among the theoretical models are ones based on risk aversion, peso problems, rare disasters, biases in investor expectations, information frictions, incomplete financial markets, and financial market segmentation.
Financial Frictions and International Trade: A Review
David Kohn, Fernando Leibovici, and Michal Szkup
This article reviews recent studies on the impact of financial frictions on international trade. We first present evidence on the relation between measures of access to external finance and export decisions. We then present an analytical framework to analyze the impact of financial frictions on firms' export decisions. Finally, we review recent applications of this framework to investigate the impact of financial frictions on international trade dynamics across firms, across industries, and in the aggregate. We discuss related empirical, theoretical, and quantitative studies throughout.
Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Open Economy
Andrea Ferrero
The development of a simple framework with optimizing agents and nominal rigidities is the point of departure for the analysis of three questions about fiscal and monetary policies in an open economy. The first question concerns the optimal monetary policy targets in a world with trade and financial links. In the baseline model, the optimal cooperative monetary policy is fully inward-looking and seeks to stabilize a combination of domestic inflation and output gap. The equivalence with the closed economy case, however, ends if countries do not cooperate, if firms price goods in the currency of the market of destination, and if international financial markets are incomplete. In these cases, external variables that capture international misalignments relative to the first best become relevant policy targets. The second question is about the empirical evidence on the international transmission of government spending shocks. In response to a positive innovation, the real exchange rate depreciates and the trade balance deteriorates. Standard open economy models struggle to match this evidence. Non-standard consumption preferences and a detailed fiscal adjustment process constitute two ways to address the puzzle. The third question deals with the trade-offs associated with an active use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes in a currency union. The optimal policy assignment mandates the monetary authority to stabilize union-wide aggregates and the national fiscal authorities to respond to country-specific shocks. Permanent changes of government debt allow to smooth the distortionary effects of volatile taxes. Clear and credible fiscal rules may be able to strike the appropriate balance between stabilization objectives and moral hazard issues.
Foreign Direct Investment and International Technology Diffusion
Difei Geng and Kamal Saggi
Foreign direct investment (FDI) plays an important role in facilitating the process of international technology diffusion. While FDI among industrialized countries primarily occurs via international mergers and acquisitions (M&As), investment headed to developing countries is more likely to be greenfield in nature; that is, it involves the establishment or expansion of new foreign affiliates by multinational firms. M&As have the potential to yield productivity improvements via changes in management and organization structure of target firms, whereas greenfield FDI leads to transfer of novel technical know-how by initiating the production of new products in host countries as well as by introducing improvements in existing production processes. Given the prominent role that multinational firms play in global research and development (R&D), there is much interest in whether and how technologies transferred by them to their foreign subsidiaries later diffuse more broadly in host economies, thereby potentially generating broad-based productivity gains. Empirical evidence shows that whereas spillovers from FDI to competing local firms are elusive, such is not the case for spillovers to local suppliers and other agents involved in vertical relationships with multinationals. Multinationals have substantially increased their investments in research facilities in various parts of the world and in R&D collaboration with local firms in developing countries, most notably China and India. Such international collaboration in R&D spearheaded by multinational firms has the potential to accelerate global productivity growth.
Geography of Growth and Development
Esteban Rossi-Hansberg
The geography of economic activity refers to the distribution of population, production, and consumption of goods and services in geographic space. The geography of growth and development refers to the local growth and decline of economic activity and the overall distribution of these local changes within and across countries. The pattern of growth in space can vary substantially across regions, countries, and industries. Ultimately, these patterns can help explain the role that spatial frictions (like transport and migration costs) can play in the overall development of the world economy. The interaction of agglomeration and congestion forces determines the density of economic activity in particular locations. Agglomeration forces refer to forces that bring together agents and firms by conveying benefits from locating close to each other, or for locating in a particular area. Examples include local technology and institutions, natural resources and local amenities, infrastructure, as well as knowledge spillovers. Congestion forces refer to the disadvantages of locating close to each other. They include traffic, high land prices, as well as crime and other urban dis-amenities. The balance of these forces is mediated by the ability of individuals, firms, good and services, as well as ideas and technology, to move across space: namely, migration, relocation, transport, commuting and communication costs. These spatial frictions together with the varying strength of congestion and agglomeration forces determines the distribution of economic activity. Changes in these forces and frictions—some purposefully made by agents given the economic environment they face and some exogenous—determine the geography of growth and development. The main evolution of the forces that influence the geography of growth and development have been changes in transport technology, the diffusion of general-purpose technologies, and the structural transformation of economies from agriculture, to manufacturing, to service-oriented economies. There are many challenges in modeling and quantifying these forces and their effects. Nevertheless, doing so is essential to evaluate the impact of a variety of phenomena, from climate change to the effects of globalization and advances in information technology.
Geography, Trade, and Power-Law Phenomena
Pao-Li Chang and Wen-Tai Hsu
This article reviews interrelated power-law phenomena in geography and trade. Given the empirical evidence on the gravity equation in trade flows across countries and regions, its theoretical underpinnings are reviewed. The gravity equation amounts to saying that trade flows follow a power law in distance (or geographic barriers). It is concluded that in the environment with firm heterogeneity, the power law in firm size is the key condition for the gravity equation to arise. A distribution is said to follow a power law if its tail probability follows a power function in the distribution's right tail. The second part of this article reviews the literature that provides the microfoundation for the power law in firm size and reviews how this power law (in firm size) may be related to the power laws in other distributions (in incomes, firm productivity and city size).
Global Spillovers in a Low Interest Rate Environment
Sushant Acharya and Paolo Pesenti
Global policy spillovers can be defined as the effect of policy changes in one country on economic outcomes in other countries. The literature has mainly focused on monetary policy interdependencies and has identified three channels through which policy spillovers can materialize. The first is the expenditure-shifting channel—a monetary expansion in one country depreciates its currency, making its goods cheaper relative to those in other countries and shifting global demand toward domestic tradable goods. The second is the expenditure-changing channel—expansionary monetary policy in one country raises both domestic and foreign expenditure. The third is the financial spillovers channel—expansionary monetary policy in one country eases financial conditions in other economies. The literature generally finds that the net transmission effect is positive but small. However, estimated spillovers vary widely across countries and over time. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the policy debate has devoted special attention to the possibility that the magnitude and sign of international spillovers might have changed in an environment of low interest rates worldwide, as the expenditure-shifting channel becomes more relevant when the effective lower bound reduces the effectiveness of conventional monetary policies.
Gravity Models and Empirical Trade
Scott Baier and Samuel Standaert
The gravity model of international trade states that the volume of trade between two countries is proportional to their economic mass and a measure of their relative trade frictions. Perhaps because of its intuitive appeal, the gravity model has been the workhorse model of international trade for more than 50 years. While the initial empirical work using the gravity model lacked sound theoretical underpinnings, the theoretical developments have highlighted how a gravity-like specification can be derived from many models with varying assumptions about preferences, technology, and market structure. Along the strengthening of the theoretical roots of the gravity model, the way in which it is estimated has also evolved significantly since the start of the new millennium. Depending on the exact characteristics of regression, different estimation methods should be used to estimate the gravity model.
Growth of Global Corporate Debt: Main Facts and Policy Challenges
Facundo Abraham, Juan J. Cortina, and Sergio L. Schmukler
There has been substantial debate about the expansion of global non-financial corporate debt after the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008–2009. But the main facts and policy challenges discussed in the literature are yet to be uncovered and summarized. Understanding the trends and issues can help readers gauge how large the growth of this type of financing has been, as well as the risks that more non-financial corporate debt might entail. Non-financial corporate debt steadily increased after the GFC, especially in emerging economies. Between 2008 and 2018, corporate debt rose from 56 to 96% of gross domestic product (GDP) in emerging economies whereas it grew at the same rate as GDP in developed economies. Non-financial corporate debt after the crisis was mainly issued through bond markets, and its growth can be largely attributed to accommodative monetary policies in developed economies. Although the growth in debt financing has some positive aspects for emerging market firms in terms of expanding financing and diversifying financing sources, it also amplified solvency risks and firms' exposure to changes in market conditions. Slower global economic growth worldwide as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic could impose significant costs to emerging market firms that increased reliance on debt financing. Policy makers in emerging economies face challenges to mitigate overall risks and to contain corporate vulnerability in the non-financial sector. Because capital markets have an important role in the expansion of financial activity and are not as regulated as banks, policy makers have limited tools to alleviate the risks of growing non-financial corporate debt.
Heterogeneous Firms, Trade Liberalization, and Welfare
Alan Spearot
While the modern theory of international trade allows for many different modeling assumptions, the gains from trade can often be calculated using a common set of statistics. In particular, the share of a country's output that is consumed domestically, the elasticity of bilateral trade with respect to trade costs, and the relationship between markups and firm size, each have a clear role in the gains from integration. All of these statistics may also be structurally linked to the degree of firm heterogeneity, usually the dispersion in firm-level productivity. Accordingly, the presence of firm heterogeneity may have a meaningful impact on the welfare response to trade liberalization. A quantitative application of a common firm heterogeneity model indicates that increased dispersion of firm-level productivity has a disproportionately large and positive impact on the gains from trade for smaller, less-developed countries.
Home Bias in International Macroeconomics
Viktoria Hnatkovska
Home bias in international macroeconomics refers to the fact that investors around the world tend to allocate majority of their portfolios into domestic assets, despite the potential benefits to be had from international diversification. This phenomenon has been occurring across countries, over time, and across equity or bond portfolios. The bias towards domestic assets tends to be larger in developing countries relative to developed economies, with Europe characterized by the lowest equity home bias, while Central and South America—by the highest equity home bias. In addition, despite the secular decline in the level of equity home bias over time in all countries and regions, home bias still remains a robust feature of the data. Whether home bias is a puzzle depends on the portfolio allocation that one uses as a theoretical benchmark. For instance, home bias in equity portfolio is a puzzle when assessed through the lens of a simple international capital asset pricing model (CAPM) with homogeneous investors. This model predicts that investors should hold world market portfolios, namely a portfolio with the share of domestic asset equal to the share of those assets in the world market portfolio. For instance, since the share of US equity in the world capitalization in 2016 was 56%, then US investors should allocate 56% of their equity portfolio into local assets, while investing the remaining 44% into foreign equities. Instead, foreign equity comprised just 23% of US equity portfolio in 2016, hence the equity home bias. Alternative portfolio benchmark comes from the theories that emphasize costs for trading assets in international financial markets. These include transaction and information costs, differential tax treatments, and more broadly, differences in institutional environments. This research, however, has so far been unable to reach a consensus on the explanatory power of such costs. Yet another theory argues that equity home bias can arise due to the hedging properties of local equity. In particular, local equity can provide insurance from real exchange rate risk and non-tradable income risk (such as labor income risk), and thus a preference towards home equities is not a puzzle, but rather an optimal response to such risks. These theories, main advances and results in the macroeconomic literature on home bias are discussed in this article. It starts by presenting some empirical facts on the extent and dynamics of equity home bias in developed and developing countries. It is then shown how home bias can arise as an equilibrium outcome of the hedging demand in the model with real exchange rate and non-tradable labor income risk. Since solving models with portfolio choice is challenging, the recent advances in solving such models are also outlined in this article. Integrating the portfolio dynamics into models that can generate realistic asset price and exchange rate dynamics remains a fruitful avenue for future research. A discussion of additional open questions in this research agenda and suggestions for further readings are also provided.
International Capital Flow Reversals (Sudden Stops)
Eduardo A. Cavallo
Sudden stops in capital flows are a form of financial whiplash that creates instability and crises in the affected economies. Sudden stops in net capital flows trigger current account reversals as countries that were borrowing on net from the rest of the world before the stop can no longer finance current account deficits. Sudden stops in gross capital flows are associated with financial instability, especially when the gross flows are dominated by volatile cross-border banking flows. Sudden stops in gross and net capital flows are episodes with an external trigger. This implies that the spark that ignites sudden stops originates outside the affected country: more specifically, in the supply of foreign financing that can halt for reasons that may be unrelated to the affected country's domestic conditions. Yet a spark cannot generate a fire unless combustible materials are around. The literature has established that a set of domestic macroeconomic fundamentals are the combustible materials that make some countries more vulnerable than others. Higher fiscal deficits, larger current account deficits, and higher levels of foreign currency debts in the domestic financial system are manifestations of weak fundamentals that increase vulnerability. Those same factors increase the costs in terms of output losses when the crisis materializes. On the flip side, international reserves provide buffers that can help countries offset the risks. Holding foreign currency reserves hedges the fiscal position of the government providing it with more resources to respond to the crisis. While it may be impossible for countries to completely insulate themselves from the volatility of capital inflows, the choice of antidotes to prevent that volatility from forcing potentially costly external adjustments is in their own hands. The global financial architecture can be improved to support those efforts if countries could agree on and fund a more powerful international lender of last resort that resembles, at the global scale, the role of the Federal Reserve Bank in promoting financial stability in the United States.
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