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I present a new model for the U.S. external position that accounts for the accumulation of international debt over the past 60 years. The model is based on the present value restriction that links a country's external position to future trade flows and financial conditions in the absence of arbitrage opportunities and Ponzi schemes. It features the role played by the stochastic discount factor, the trade and valuation adjustment channels and provides a decomposition of the U.S. external position into secular and cyclical components. The model shows that shocks operating via the valuation channel are the dominant drivers of cyclical dynamics, accounting for approximately 80% of the variance over the 60-year sample. This channel works primarily via capital gains and losses on U.S. foreign assets and is closely tied to the international value of the U.S. dollar. In contrast, there is no evidence that valuation channel adjustments contribute to the secular dynamics, but differences between the average returns on foreign assets and liabilities raise the steady-state debt-to-GDP ratio from approximately 12 to 15%. The long-term deterioration in the U.S. position represents a move towards the steady-state before the early 1990s and a move away from the steady-state thereafter. I quantify the expected improvement in future U.S. trade balances needed to justify this as a sustainable path and show that they are very different from its actual behavior during the last 60 years. I also study the behavior of the U.S. position during the 2007–2008 financial crisis.

In theory financial globalisation has an ambiguous effect on monetary policy effectiveness. On the one hand, exposure to global financial cycles dampens the output effect of a tightening in monetary policy in financially integrated economies and thereby reduces monetary policy effectiveness. On the other hand, another salient feature of financial globalisation is that economies have become increasingly net long in foreign currency, which amplifies monetary policy effectiveness: economies experience larger valuation losses and wealth effects on their external balance sheets in response to an exchange rate appreciation when monetary policy is tightened, hence triggering stronger output effects. We quantify empirically the net impact of financial globalisation on monetary policy effectiveness through these two opposing channels. We find that since the 1990s the second channel has dominated so that financial globalisation has amplified monetary policy effectiveness in the typical advanced and emerging market economy. By our estimates, the output effect of a tightening in monetary policy has increased by 25% due to financial globalisation. Our results imply that financial globalisation has modified the transmission of monetary policy by strengthening the importance of the exchange rate channel.

This paper studies the geography of wealth transfers between 2007Q4 and 2008Q4, at the height of the global financial crisis. We construct valuation changes on bilateral external positions in equity, direct investment and portfolio debt to measure who benefited and who lost on their external exposure. We find a very diverse set of fortunes governed by the structure of countries' external portfolios. In particular, we are able to relate the gains and losses on debt portfolios to the country's exposure to ABS, ABCP conduits and the extent of dollar shortage.

In the past two decades, cross-border portfolio holdings of a large variety of assets have risen sharply. This has created an important role for changes in asset prices of a country's external assets and liabilities (i.e."valuation effects") in affecting the country's net foreign asset position. Valuation effects are commonly thought as stabilizing: they counteract current account movements and mitigate the impact of the current account on the country's net foreign asset position. This paper shows that whether valuation effects are stabilizing or not depends critically on the nature of underlying productivity shocks. In response to transitory shocks, valuation effects are stabilizing; but in response to trend shocks, such effects amplify the impact of the current account on the net foreign asset position. These contrasting results arise because optimally smoothing consumers respond differently to a transitory shock than to a trend shock to income. The results are consistent with the pattern of external imbalances between the United States and other G.7 countries since the 1990s.

‘Valuation effects’ can imply that the traditional current account is an inaccurate measure of the change in the net foreign asset (NFA) position. This paper uses new developments in the analysis of portfolio choice in general equilibrium to investigate valuation effects in a two-country model. Broadly speaking, the valuation effects in the model correspond to those observed in the data. But there is a key distinction between ‘unanticipated’ and ‘anticipated’ valuation effects. Unanticipated effects can be large, dominating the movement in NFA, but anticipated effects arise only at higher orders of approximation and are small for reasonable parameterizations.

Recent literature has argued that conventional measures of external sustainability – the trade balance and current account – are misleading because they omit capital gains on net foreign asset positions. We adjust the definition of the current account to include the capital gains and discuss how this may affect our thinking about external adjustment and sustainability. We do so in the context of a two-country macro-finance model of Pavlova and Rigobon (2008a) that allows exploration of the interconnections between equilibrium portfolios and external accounts' dynamics. We calibrate the model and find that it generates several testable implications, some of which have already been validated empirically. First, we establish dynamic properties of the capital-gains adjusted current account and show that they are fundamentally different from those of the conventional current account. Second, we find that capital gains have a stabilizing effect on the trade balance and the current account. Finally, we demonstrate that in response to a shock, the conventional and the capital-gains adjusted current accounts may move in opposite directions., Fondation Banque de France

Despite the liberalization of capital ‡ows among OECD countries, equity home bias remains sizable. We depart from the two familiar explanations of equity home bias: transaction costs that impede international diversi…cation, and terms of trade responses to supply shocks that provide risk sharing, so that there is little incentive to hold diversi…ed portfolios. We show that the interaction of the following ingredients generates a realistic equity home bias: capital accumulation, shocks to the e¢ ciency of physical investment, as well as international trade in stocks and bonds. In our model, domestic stocks are used to hedge ‡uctuations in local wage income. Terms of trade risk is hedged using bonds denominated in local goods and in foreign goods. In contrast to related models, the low level of international diversi…cation does not depend on strongly countercyclical terms of trade. The model also reproduces the cyclical dynamics of foreign asset positions and of international capital ‡ows.

We provide estimates of the effects of demand and supply shocks in the global crude oil market on several measures of oil exporters' and oil importers' external balances, including the oil trade balance, the non-oil trade balance, the current account, capital gains, and changes in net foreign assets (NFA). First, we show that the effect of oil demand and supply shocks on the merchandise trade balance and the current account, which depending on the source of the shock can be large, depends critically on the response of the non-oil trade balance. Our results provide evidence of an intermediate degree of international financial integration. Second, we document the presence of large and systematic valuation effects in response to these shocks. Valuation effects overall tend to cushion the effect of oil demand and supply shocks on the NFA positions of oil exporters and oil importers. Third, we quantify the overall importance of global business cycle demand shocks as well as oil-market specific demand and supply shocks for external balances.