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Working Paper
New Evidence on the US Excess Return on Foreign Portfolios
We provide new estimates of the return on US external claims and liabilities using confidential, high-quality, security-level data. The excess return is positive on average, since claims are tilted toward higher-return equities. The excess return is large and positive in normal times but large and negative during global crises, reflecting the global insurance role of the US external balance sheet. Controlling for issuer's nationality, we find that US investors have a larger exposure to equity issued by Asia-headquartered corporations than reported in the aggregate statistics. Finally, equity ...
Working Paper
How long can the unsustainable U.S. current account deficit be sustained?
This paper addresses three questions about the prospects for the U.S. current account deficit. Is it sustainable in the long term? If not, how long will it take for measures of external debt and debt service to reach levels that could prompt some pullback by global investors? And if and when such levels are breached, how readily would asset prices respond and the current account start to narrow? ; To address these questions, we start with projections of a detailed partial-equilibrium model of the U.S. balance of payments. Based on plausible assumptions of the key drivers of the U.S. external ...
Discussion Paper
Globalization and the Geography of Capital Flows
In this note, we document the large and growing distortions in official capital flows and investment statistics as a result of globalization. We provide a series of stylized facts about the extent and causes of these distortions, and also include data files containing U.S. portfolio holdings restated on a nationality basis to reflect the true exposures of U.S. investors.
Journal Article
Understanding U.S. cross-border securities data
Journal Article
The launch of the euro
The introduction on January 1, 1999, of the euro--the single currency adopted by eleven of the fifteen countries of the European Union--marked the beginning of the final stage of Economic and Monetary Union and the start of a new era in Europe. The creation of a single currency and a single monetary policy has provided both extraordinary challenges and exceptional opportunities within Europe. This article reviews the organization, objectives, and targets of the euro area's new central bank and discusses some of the early challenges it has faced in setting and implementing monetary policy with ...
Working Paper
Household portfolios in the United States
This paper investigates the composition of households' assets and liabilities in the United States. Using aggregate and survey data, we document major trends in household portfolios in the past 15 years. We show that, despite the broad array of financial products available, the portfolio of the typical household remains fairly simple and safe, consisting of a checking account, savings account, and tax-deferred retirement account; in 1998, less than half of all households owned some form of stock. We use pooled data from the Survey of Consumer Finances to investigate determinants of portfolio ...
Working Paper
Stockholding behavior of U.S. households: evidence from the 1983-89 Survey of Consumer Finances
Most households persistently invest in riskless assets but not stocks, and may do so because they perceive the information required for market participation to be costly relative to expected benefits. In a CCAPM, increased risk aversion, income risk, and lower resources reduce the information expense sufficient to deter stockholding. Bivariate probit analysis using the 1983-89 Survey of Consumer Finances shows that households with lower risk aversion, higher education, and greater wealth who were nonstockholders in 1983 had an increased conditional probability of entering by 1989, while 1983 ...
Working Paper
Precautionary portfolio behavior from a life-cycle perspective
The literature on asset accumulation by households draws a sharp distinction between "short-run" precautionary motives to buffer annual consumption from annual labor income shocks, and "long-run" life cycle considerations under labor income certainty. However, empirical estimates of the persistence of shocks to annual incomes imply that households are subject to considerable career uncertainty. We study long-run precautionary motives for life-cycle wealth accumulation and portfolio choice. We compute optimal portfolios under three sources of uncertainty (stock returns, incomes, and ...