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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
Cross-border returns differentials
Were the U.S. to persistently earn substantially more on its foreign investments ("U.S. claims") than foreigners earn on their U.S. investments ("U.S. liabilities"), the likelihood that the current environment of sizeable global imbalances will evolve in a benign manner increases. However, we find that the returns differential of U.S. claims over U.S. liabilities is far smaller than previously reported and, importantly, is near zero for portfolio equity and debt securities. ; > For portfolio securities, we confirm our finding using a separate dataset on the actual foreign equity and bond ...
Discussion Paper
Non-Financial Corporate Credit and Recessions
The global financial crisis of 2008-09 (GFC) followed an extended period of growth in non-financial corporate (NFC) sector debt. NFC corporate debt resumed its climb a few years after the GFC, and the pace of growth picked up in 2020, as firms took on debt to cover revenue lost during the pandemic or to build up precautionary liquidity buffers.
Working Paper
International Spillovers of Monetary Policy : Conventional Policy vs. Quantitative Easing
This paper evaluates the popular view that quantitative easing exerts greater international spillovers than conventional monetary policies. We employ a novel approach to compare the international spillovers of conventional and balance sheet policies undertaken by the Federal Reserve. In principle, conventional monetary policy affects bond yields and financial conditions by affecting the expected path of short rates, while balance-sheet policy is believed act through the term premium. To distinguish the effects of these two types of policies we use a term structure model to decompose ...
Working Paper
Current account sustainability and relative reliability
The sustainability of the large and persistent U.S. current account deficits is one of the biggest issues currently being confronted by international macroeconomists. Some very plausible theories suggest that the substantial global imbalances can continue in a benign manner, other equally plausible theories predict a disorderly resolution, and in general it is very difficult to discern between competing theories. To inform the debates, we view competing theories through the perspective of the relative reliability of the data the theories rely on. Our analysis of the dark matter theory is ...
Working Paper
On returns differentials
Estimates of U.S. returns differentials have ranged from exorbitant to quite small, in part because of their volatility coupled with the relatively short time series available. We shed light on underlying drivers of returns differentials by presenting a number of decompositions: a by-asset-class decomposition into yields and capital gains, the Gourinchas and Rey (2007a) composition and return effects, and further decompositions of capital gains that focus on exchange rate effects. While each decomposition informs thinking about returns differentials, one constant is evident throughout: to ...
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.
Working Paper
The stability of large external imbalances: the role of returns differentials
Were the U.S. to persistently earn substantially more on its foreign investments (?U.S. claims?) than foreigners earn on their U.S. investments (?U.S. liabilities?), the likelihood that the current environment of sizeable global imbalances will evolve in a benign manner increases. However, utilizing data on the actual foreign equity and bond portfolios of U.S. investors and the U.S. equity and bond portfolios of foreign investors, we find that the returns differential of U.S. claims over U.S. liabilities is essentially zero. Ending our sample in 2005, the differential is positive, whereas ...