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A binding interest rate cap on household savings is a common form of financial repression in developing economies and typically benefits banks. Using proprietary data from a leading Chinese FinTech company, we study Fintech's role in ending financial repression in China through the introduction of a money market fund with deposit-like features available through an already widely-adopted household payment platform. Cities and banks whose depositor base is more exposed to FinTech see greater deposit outflows. Importantly, exposed banks respond to FinTech competition by offering competing products with market interest rates. FinTech thus facilitates a bottom-up interest rate liberalization. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

While major stock market indices are followed by large monetary investments, we document that membership decisions for S&P 500 have a nontrivial amount of discretion. We show that firms’ purchases of S&P ratings appear to improve their chance of entering the index (but purchases of Moody’s ratings do not). Furthermore, firms tend to purchase more S&P ratings when there are openings in the index membership. Such a pattern is also confirmed by an event study that explores a rule change on index membership in 2002. Finally, discretionary additions exhibit subsequent deterioration in financial performance relative to rules-based additions. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Standard models of capital flows to emerging market economies focus on debt flows and a pecuniary externality. However, by offering better risk sharing, international equity flows can render such externality unimportant, yet many economies fail to attract equity investment in a large quantity. We propose a theory of endogenous composition of capital flows that highlights two asymmetries. In our model, poor institutional quality leads to an inefficiently low share of equity financing as well as an inefficiently high volume of total inflows. Somewhat surprisingly, a social planner would often impose taxes on both equity and debt inflows. Our story differs in important ways from an alternative narrative focusing on collateral constraint.

Many developing countries do not seem to benefit from capital account liberalizations. We find that labor market frictions can be an important reason for this and develop a model to explain the relationship between unemployment and capital account openness. In our model, a developing country with a flexible labor market tends to attract more capital inflow after capital account liberalization and hence, employment and output go up. On the other hand, when a developing country has a rigid labor market, opening the capital account leads to greater capital outflow and both employment and output fall. Such a pattern becomes less obvious in advanced economies. Using cross-country data from 1980 to 2004, we provide empirical evidence to support the theoretical predictions. When calibrating our model to Peru, which has a rigid labor market and opened its capital account in the 1990s, we find that 40% of the increase in the unemployment rate in Peru in that period is due to the capital account liberalization. One policy insight from our analysis is that for developing countries labor market reforms and capital account liberalization are complements.

We seek to draw lessons for developing countries based on a survey of the recent literature on financial globalization. First, while capital account openness holds promises (by potentially generating a lower cost of capital, better risk sharing, and stronger disciplines on policies), they do not always work out that way in the data. Distortions in the domestic financial market, international capital market, domestic labor market, and domestic public governance can make financial globalization less beneficial for developing countries. Second, developing countries sometimes need to insulate themselves from foreign monetary policy shocks. The empirical pattern appears to be somewhere between a trilemma and a dilemma. While nominal exchange rate flexibility is insufficient for policy autonomy, capital flow management may be needed to confer more monetary policy autonomy.

This paper studies the effect of transport infrastructure on the real exchange rate (RER) and reaches two relatively strong conclusions. First, while the list of robust determinants of the RER is not long, transport infrastructure belongs to that list. Many other potential determinants proposed in the literature, such as net foreign asset position or terms of trade, turn out to be not robust. Second, in terms of economic significance, the infrastructure effect follows closely the well-known Balassa-Samuelson effect and is one of the most important explanatory variables for RER movements, especially in developing countries.

Since the extent of offshoring and production sharing varies by sector and country, we develop measures of GVCs in terms of length, intensity, and location of participation at the levels of country, country-sector, and bilateral sector, and distinguish among pure domestic, directly traded, and indirectly traded production activities. Using these measures, we characterize cross-country production sharing patterns and GVC related trade activities for 35 sectors and 40 countries over 17 years. We find that the production chain for the world as a whole has become longer. While the relative ranking of the length at the sector level is stable across countries, the average length for a given country-sector, of both the domestic and international components, and their participation and position in GVCs in general, do evolve significantly over time. The results contribute to a better understanding of features of global value chains and patterns of participation by individual country-sectors.

This short essay surveys recent literature on the competitive saving motive and its broader economic implications. The competitive saving motive is defined as saving to improve one's status relative to other competitors for dating and marriage partners. Here are some of the key results of the recent literature: (i) cross-country evidence show that greater gender imbalances tend to correspond with higher savings rates; (ii) household-level evidence suggest that: (a) families with unmarried sons in rural regions with more skewed sex ratios tend to have higher savings rates, while savings rates of families with unmarried daughters appear uncorrelated with gender imbalances; and (b) savings rates of families in cities tend to rise with the local sex ratio; (iii) rising sex ratios contribute nearly half of the rise in housing prices in the People’s Republic of China; and (iv) families with sons in regions of greater sex ratios are more likely to become entrepreneurs and take risky jobs to earn more income.

Though the real exchange rate is a key price for most economies, our understanding of its determinants is still incomplete. This paper studies the implications of status competition in the marriage market for the real exchange rate. In theory, a rise in the sex ratio (increasing relative surplus of men) can generate a decline in the real exchange rate (RER) through both a savings channel and an effective labor supply channel. The effects can be quantitatively large if the biological desire for a marriage partner is strong. Empirically, we show that within China, those regions with a faster increase in the sex ratio also exhibit a faster decline in the RER (the relative price of nontradables). Furthermore, across countries, those with a high sex ratio tend to have a low real exchange rate, beyond what can be explained by the Balassa-Samuelson effect, financial underdevelopment, dependence ratio, and exchange rate regime classifications. As an application, the estimation suggests that these structural factors can account for the Chinese exchange rate almost completely.

Do middle-income countries face difficult challenges producing consistent growth? Using transition matrix analysis, we can easily reject any unconditional notion of a 'middle-income trap' in the data. However, countries have different fundamentals and policies. Using a non-parametric classification technique, we search for variables that separate fast- and slow-growing countries. For middle-income countries, a relatively large working age population, sex ratio imbalance, macroeconomic stability, and financial development appear to be the key discriminatory variables. We do the same exercise for low-income countries. This framework yields conditions under which countries in the low- and middle-income ranges are trapped or even move backward.

When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it may be tempted to expropriate the private sector. This may be one reason for why international investment in private companies has to take into account the sovereign risk. But the likelihood of a transfer from the sovereign risk to corporate default risks may be mitigated by legal institutions that provide strong property rights protection. Using a novel credit default swaps (CDS) dataset covering both government and corporate entities across 30 countries, this paper studies both the average strength of the transfer risks and the role of institutions in mitigating such risks. We find that (1) sovereign risk on average has a statistically and economically significant influence on corporate credit risks. All else equal, a 100 basis points increase in the sovereign CDS spread leads to an increase in corporate CDS spreads by 71 basis points. (2) The sovereign-corporate relation varies across corporations, with state-owned companies exhibiting a stronger relation. (3) However, strong property rights institutions tend to weaken the connection. In contrast, contracting institutions (protection of creditor rights or minority shareholder rights) do not appear to matter much in this context

This paper investigates whether foreign institutional investors in emerging markets can enhance shareholder value. We pay special attention to two dimensions of investor heterogeneity: whether an investor declares itself as an activist, and whether an investor comes from a country with a strong tradition of investor activism. First, we apply an event study approach to the announcements of block purchases by foreign institutional investors in Korea. We find that stock prices rise on average, but only when foreign institutional investors declare themselves as activists. Source country identities also matter: The positive stock price reactions are more pronounced when the activist investors come from source countries with a strong tradition of investor activism. Second, we examine corporate financial policies and governance practices of target firms one to three years following block purchases by foreign activist investors. We find that target firms are more likely to reduce cash holdings, raise leverage ratios, and peg dividend payouts and stock repurchases more closely to changes in earnings, but only if foreign activists are from countries with a strong tradition of activism. We conclude that openness to foreign activist investors, especially those from countries with a strong tradition of activism, can indeed put pressures on firms in emerging markets to adopt corporate governance practices that enhance shareholder values.

Motivated by recent empirical work, this paper formalizes a theory of competitive savings — an arms race in household savings for mating competition that is made more fierce by an increase in the male-to-female ratio in the pre-marital cohort. Relative to the empirical work, the theory can clarify a number of important questions: What determines the strength of the savings response by males (or households with a son)? Can women (or households with a daughter) dis-save? What are the conditions under which aggregate savings would go up in response to a higher sex ratio? This theory can potentially help to understand the savings patterns in China, India, Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, and other economies that have experienced a dramatic increase in the pre-marital sex ratio.

When the credit market was frozen in spite of a low nominal interest rate during the 2008-2010 global financial crisis, many governments undertook a set of unconventional measures, such as debt guarantee, bank recapitalization, and purchase of bank toxic assets. Did these unconventional interventions achieve their intended policy objective of unfreezing the credit market? This paper pursues a systematic investigation of this question. We first construct a novel and comprehensive dataset of 231 interventions for 15 countries from August 2008 to July 2010 and identify a subset of those most likely containing elements of a surprise based on the media coverage during that period. We then use stock price data on 6344 listed non-financial firms in those countries and explore heterogeneous responses to the interventions across firms in different sectors. We find that the stock prices of firms increased when the interventions were implemented, particularly for firms with large intrinsic liquidity needs for working capital. This positive and differential effect was more pronounced if the banking sector experienced a higher abnormal return around an intervention date. Moreover, the results become even stronger for the subset of intervention announcements that are more likely to contain surprise components. These findings suggest that unconventional interventions have alleviated the liquidity constraint faced by non-financial firms. However, relative to the severity of the financial crisis, the quantitative effect of any given interventions was limited.