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Working Paper
A Theory of Net Capital Flows over the Global Financial Cycle
We develop a theory to account for changes in net capital flows of safe and risky assets over the global financial cycle. We show empirically that countries that have a net debt of safe assets experience a rise in net outflows of safe assets (reduced accumulation of safe debt) during a downturn in the global financial cycle. This is accomplished through a rise in total net outflows and a drop in net outflows of risky assets. We develop a multi-country portfolio choice model that can account for these facts. The theory relies on cross-country heterogeneity in the share of an investor's ...
Working Paper
A Theory of Capital Flow Retrenchment
The empirical literature shows that gross capital inflows and outflows both decline following a negative global shock. However, to generate a positive co-movement between gross inflows and outflows, the theoretical literature relies on asymmetric shocks across countries. We present a model where there is heterogeneity across investors within countries, but there are no asymmetries across countries. We show that a negative global shock (rise in global risk-aversion) generates an identical drop in gross inflows and outflows. The within-country heterogeneity relates to the willingness of ...
Working Paper
The Real Term Premium in a Stationary Economy with Segmented Asset Markets
This paper proposes an equilibrium model to explain the positive and sizable term premia observed in the data. We introduce a slow mean-reverting process of consumption growth and a segmented asset market mechanism with heterogeneous trading technology to otherwise a standard heterogeneous agent general equilibrium model. First, a slow mean-reverting consumption growth process implies that the expected consumption growth rate is only slightly countercyclical and the process can exhibit a near zero first-order autocorrelation as seen in the data. The very small countercyclicality of the ...
Working Paper
A Theory of Gross and Net Capital Flows over the Global Financial Cycle
We develop a theory to account for changes in gross and net capital flows over the global financial cycle (GFC). The theory relies critically on portfolio heterogeneity among investors within and across countries, related to risky portfolio shares and portfolio shares allocated to foreign assets. A global drop in risky asset prices during a downturn of the GFC changes relative wealth within and across countries due to portfolio heterogeneity. This leads to changes in gross and net capital flows that are consistent with the stylized facts: all countries experience a decline in gross capital ...