capital flow controls international asset pricing and investors welfare a multi country framework this paper investigates the impact of capital flow restrictions on the pricing of securities on the optimal portfolio composition for investors of different nationalities and on their welfare under capital flow controls the equilibrium price of a security is determined jointly by its international and national risk premiums and investors acquire nationality specific portfolios along with a market wide proxy for the world market portfolio removal of investment barriers generally leads to an increase in the aggregate market value of the affected securities and all investors favor a move toward market integration introduction of different types of index funds in the world market generally increases world market integration and investor welfare in recent years the international capital markets have undergone numerous important changes that have increased the international linkage of national markets these changes include the creation of national index funds e g mexico korea taiwan india france and scandinavia and selective liberalization e g brazil india korea sweden and japan despite their potential impact on the national economies and global finance it is not clear what consequences these integrating changes entail for example is welfare increased by allowing cross border investment that is restricted to purchasing the entire national portfolio of which the national index fund is a class unfortunately with the exception of subrahmanyam 1975a who studies the pricing and welfare effects of fully integrating heretofore completely segmented markets other international asset pricing models that incorporate capital flow restrictions for instance black 1974 stulz 1981b lessard et al 1983 errunza and losq 1985 cooper and kaplanis 1986 and eun and janakiramanan 1986 analyze the pricing but not the welfare effects of investment barriers to analyze systematically the welfare implications of various structural changes in the current market environment this paper follows the lead of subrahmanyam and recasts the analysis in two important respects

economic activity and recession probabilities information content and predictive power of the term spread in italy the aim of the present article is to examine the information content of the italian term spread as for real economic growth rates and recession probabilities and to test its predictive power in forecasting regime probabilities to this end the relationship between the term spread and economic growth rates is modelled as a nonlinear one and specifically the logistic smooth transition model is used while a probit model is implemented to forecast recession probabilities specific to this article is the use of the oecd business cycle chronology which was never used before to this end for the italian case overall evidence supports the informative content of the spread in italy over the whole period 1984 2005 although results are more satisfactory as from 1992 in particular recession forecasts are generally better than those obtained with other chronologies previously adopted for the italian case isae and ecri

global diversification growth and welfare with imperfectly integrated markets for goods in this article we examine the effect of the imperfect mobility of goods on international risk sharing and through that on the investment in risky projects welfare and growth our main result is that the welfare gain from integration of financial markets is not greatly reduced by the presence of goods market imperfections modeled as a cost of transferring goods from one country to the other we also find that the gain is nonmonotonic with respect to investors risk aversion and the aggregate volatility of output growth the policy implication to be drawn is that financial market integration is a worthwhile goal to pursue even when full goods mobility has not been achieved article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

concentration diversification and earnings instability some evidence on developing countries exports of manufactures and primary products policies aimed at diversification of the commodity composition of exports continue to be advocated as a means of reducing instability in ldcs export earnings the usual assumptions are that earnings from manufactures are more stable than earnings from primary products and that diversification will reduce the covariances between earnings from different pairs of products it is suggested here that for several reasons these assumptions may not be valid evidence is then presented which indicates that across a sample of countries diversification has taken place but has not been accompanied by relatively greater stability in manufactures and favourable changes in covariances

risk taking global diversification and growth this paper develops a continuous time stochastic model in which international risk sharing can yield substantial welfare gains through its effect on expected consumption growth the mechanism linking global diversification to growth is an attendant world portfolio shift from safe low yield capital to riskier high yield capital the presence of these two types of capital captures the idea that growth depends on the availability of an ever increasing array of specialized hence inherently risky production inputs calibration exercises using consumption and stock market data imply that most countries reap large steady state welfare gains from global financial integration copyright 1994 by american economic association

interest rates and currency prices in a two country world abstract this paper is a theoretical study of the determination of prices interest rates and currency exchange rates set in an infinitely lived two country world which is subject both to stochastic endowment shocks and to monetary instability formulas are obtained for pricing all equity claims nominally denominated bonds and currencies and these formulas are related to earlier closely related results in the theories of money finance international trade

a model of credit risk optimal policies and asset prices this article studies an economy with borrowers firms or individuals under costly default borrowers defaulting under adverse economic conditions may despite incurring default costs emerge as wealthier than nonborrowers asset substitution is generally not pronounced although a larger risk exposure by borrowers may also occur and then binary options emerge as useful credit derivatives the asset value dynamics are endogenously determined and shown to exhibit stochastic mean and volatility in contrast to many credit risk models in equilibrium the market level is increased decreased in economic downturns upturns by the presence of credit risk

commodity trade and international risk sharing how much do financial markets matter abstract this paper evaluates the social gains from international risk sharing in some simple general equilibrium models with output uncertainty a simulation model calibrated to selected moments of u s and japanese data estimates the incremental loss from a ban on international portfolio diversification to be on the order of 0 20 percent of output per year even the theoretical gains from asset trade may disappear under alternative sets of assumptions on preferences and technology the paper argues that the small magnitude of potential trade gains may help explain the apparently inconsistent findings of empirical studies on the degree of international capital mobility

an intertemporal model of international capital market segmentation this paper develops an intertemporal model of international capital market segmentation within the model under various forms of segmentation integration the equilibrium asset prices and allocations the risk free interest rate and the intertemporal consumption behavior and welfares of two countries are derived and compared it is shown that the equilibrium interest rate is increased on integration and that integrating markets may be significantly welfare decreasing for one of the countries conditions that may lead to a decrease in welfare are investigated the conclusions as to the effects of segmentation on asset prices in the mean variance model of the existing finance segmentation literature are also shown to break down in an intertemporal model

international good market segmentation and financial innovation abstract while international capital flows are now well liberalized markets for goods remain segmented to investigate how financial innovation may relieve the effects of this segmentation on risk sharing we examine a series of two country economies with internationally segmented good markets distinguished by the available financial securities sufficient conditions for efficiency include complete international financial markets together with liberalized international financial flows under these conditions heterogeneous agents from the same country may use securities as a substitute for the international shipment of goods this allows them to partially circumvent the segmentation allowing for efficient risk sharing

the role of risk aversion and intertemporal substitution in dynamic consumption portfolio choice with recursive utility abstract our objective is to understand how risk aversion and elasticity of intertemporal substitution under recursive utility affect dynamic consumption portfolio decisions for a three date model with a stochastic interest rate we obtain an analytic solution for the optimal policies we find that in general consumption and portfolio decisions depend on both risk aversion and elasticity of intertemporal substitution the size of risk aversion relative to unity determines the sign of the intertemporal hedging portfolio while elasticity of intertemporal substitution affects only its magnitude the portfolio weight is independent of elasticity of intertemporal substitution only for the case of a constant investment opportunity set

capital market integration abstract liberalization in the ec in 1992 should produce perfect capital market integration to show the short and long run effects of perfectly integrated capital markets we develop a tractable growth model where investment flows to earn the highest rate of return the economy first goes through potential and then actual integration before and after rates of return are equalized we show relative changes of capital intensities outputs per capita rates of return and the real exchange rate during both stages of integration

adjustment costs and international trade dynamics abstract this paper develops a model of trader behavior that is characterized by quadratic adjustment costs imperfect competition and rational expectations the model is fitted to data on aggregate trade flows between the united states and three of its largest trading partners tests against alternative specifications confirm the importance of imperfect competition and adjustment costs the hypothesis of rational expectations cannot be rejected the estimated price elasticities of trade flows are generally in the range reported by previous researchers but the activity elasticities are significantly higher

habit persistence and welfare gains from international asset trade we introduce habit formation in a model that studies the link between international trade in financial assets economic growth and welfare as with time separable preferences asset trade increases the mean growth rate but it also increases growth volatility we demonstrate that the welfare gain from asset trade is lower with habit persistence in consumption this reflects that the habit forming households perceive the higher growth volatility as a higher cost to obtain increased average growth calibrating the model to data for north america and western europe we find that habit persistence lowers welfare gains of financial integration by about 40 50

international capital markets and redundant securities abstract in this paper we propose a general equilibrium model of a two country two good complete dynamic financial market we fully characterize the equilibrium and show that under time additively separable preferences there exist redundant securities in international capital markets for example using the foreign bond and domestic securities investors are able to replicate foreign equity however unlike zapatero 1995 equilibrium asset prices and exchange rates journal of economic dynamics and control 19 787 811 and pavlova and rigobon 2003 asset prices and exchange rate nber working paper 9834 the perfect correlation between equity markets obtained under the restrictive assumption of logarithmic preferences does not hold under more general specifications of utility even though the pricing kernels in the two countries are perfectly linked through the exchange rate

international risk sharing and economic growth international risk sharing which diversifies away income risk will reduce saving with constant relative risk aversion if growth arises from the external effects of human capital accumulation then reducing saving will reduce growth welfare also may fall with risk sharing because endogenous growth with external effects of capital accumulation typically implies a competitive equilibrium growth rate already less than the optimal growth rate we demonstrate these results in a standard representative agent economy diversifying away rate of return risk also will reduce saving and growth rates if relative risk aversion exceeds one but this diversification always increases welfare this paper studies the effects of international risk sharing portfolio diversification in a world economy in which growth rates of income are endogenous growth is based upon the spillover effects of human capital accumulation as in lucas 1988 and romer 1986 there are positive economy wide spillovers of human capital intensity on individual labour productivity in section 2 we construct a multi country growth model with an infinitely lived representative agent in each country each country faces income risk but there is no aggregate uncertainty at the world level we focus on two market structures in the first structure there are no markets which allow for international diversification of country specific income risk in the second structure there are complete international markets for risksharing with no aggregate world uncertainty this completeness allows full diversification of country specific risk the paper has two central results first growth rates in all countries are lower in the equilibrium with full diversification second in this same structure welfare of each country may be lower than in an equilibrium without risk sharing the reasoning is as follows with external effects of capital accumulation the compet

trade costs asset market frictions and risk sharing i use bilateral import data to test for and quantify the importance of trade costs and asset market frictions in explaining the failure of perfect international consumption risk sharing i find that while frictions in international asset markets significantly impede optimal consumption risk sharing between developed and developing countries over the period 1970 2000 developed countries are close to optimal risk sharing with each other trade costs in contrast sig

small fields big money two successful programs in helping small farmers make the transition to high value added crops abstract this paper compares two successful programs one in present day thailand and one in taiwan during the 1960s in which small rice farmers were helped to make the transition to growing high value added horticultural crops during the off season the key to the success of both programs appears to have been the flexible and creative interplay between government and the private sector of special interest to the debate over the proper role of government in furthering development is taiwan s planned production and marketing system where officials consulted with industry and set mandatory production quotas which were allocated to each township and cannery

capital controls and international capital market segmentation the evidence from the japanese and american stock markets the paper focuses on two countries japan and the u s to test the integration of capital markets in japan the enactment of the foreign exchange and foreign trade control law in december of 1980 amounted to a true regime switch that virtually eliminated capital controls using multifactor asset pricing models we show that the price of risk in the u s and japanese stock markets was different before but not after the liberalization this evidence supports the view that governments are the source of international capital market segmentation the notion that world capital markets are perfectly integrated is central to most theoretical developments in both international finance and macroeconomics indeed it also lies behind much of the recent international policy discussion capital markets are integrated if assets with perfectly correlated rates of return have the same price regardless of the location in which they are traded 1 segmentation may arise either because of government impediments to capital movements or because of individuals attitudes or irrationality if the hypothesis that the international capital markets are integrated is rejected there is still an important empirical question left unanswered which is related to the source of segmentation while there is a rich body of theoretical research on international market integration only a few studies have tried to investigate this important question empirically a first group of empirical studies on market integration has generally adopted

transactions costs and nonlinear adjustment in real exchange rates an empirical investigation eolquilibrium models of real exchange rate determination in the presence of transactions costs imply a nonlinear adjustment process toward purchasing power parity ppp conventional cointegration tests which ignore the effect of transactions costs may be biased against the long run ppp hypothesis our results using both monthly data for the interwar period and annual data spanning two centuries clearly reject the linear framework in favor of an exponential smooth transition autoregressive process the systematic pattern in the estimates of the nonlinear models provides strong evidence of mean reverting behavior for ppp deviations and helps explain the mixed results of previous studies

can africa industrialize by processing primary commodities the case of mozambican cashew nuts abstract industrialization strategies based on vertical diversification into processing of primary commodities have long been appealing to low income countries the performance of such strategies is mixed an aggregate level literature is divided on the advisability of low income countries processing commodities for export especially for countries relatively poor in human capital while this general literature usefully illuminates the policy debate over processing cashew nuts in mozambique commodity and country specific factors reveal the weaknesses of conducting debate at too aggregated a level it may be that the most significant constraints on processing industrialization are political rather than purely technical or economic

international risk sharing and capital mobility abstract under certain assumptions pareto efficient risk sharing implies that changes in consumption across nations will be perfectly correlated this result leads to an indicator of the welfare loss due to imperfect sharing of consumption risks across nations this indicator is used to evaluate the welfare implications of restrictions on various components of the international capital flow holding constant other components of the flow and domestic investment we find that variability in national consumption growth rates would have been considerably greater if capital flows had been restricted and that welfare would have been reduced significantly

international risk sharing and capital mobility another look in a recent article brennan and solnik 1989 attempt to quantify numerically the welfare benefits of risk sharing by a group of oecd economies the result of their calculation is striking in their words p 371 the estimated welfare loss due to impairment of efficient risk sharing if capital flows were eliminated is of the order of 448 per cent of the level of consumption prevailing in the early 1970s this note argues that the brennan solnik welfare measure is faulty and leads to a substantial overstatement of the potential welfare benefits of international risk sharing within their sample of countries for standard levels of risk aversion the brennan solnik measure may overstate these benefits by as much as two orders of magnitude this is true even if one accepts as valid the empirical assumptions the authors make in calculating the consumption variability estimates that underlie their welfare conclusions