Category: Graciela Laura Kaminsky

The Financial Center Leverage Cycle: Does it Spread Around the World?

2020, Global Governance, Graciela Laura Kaminsky, Working Papers

February 2020

Graciela Laura Kaminsky, Leandro Medina, Shiyi Wang

IIEP working paper 2020-2

Abstract: With a novel database, we examine the evolution of capital flows to the periphery since the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in the early 1970s. We decompose capital flows into global, regional, and idiosyncratic factors. In contrast to previous findings, which mostly use data from the 2000s, we find that booms and busts in capital flows are mainly explained by regional factors and not the global factor. We then ask, what drives these regional factors. Is it the leverage cycle in the financial center? What triggers the leverage cycle in the financial center? Is it a change in global investors’ risk appetite? Or, is it a change in the demand for capital in the periphery? We link leverage in the financial center to regional capital flows and the cost of borrowing in international capital markets to answer these questions. Our estimations indicate that regional capital flows are driven by supply shocks. Interestingly, we find that the leverage in the financial center has a time-varying behavior, with a movement away from lending to the emerging periphery in the 1970s to the 1990s towards lending to the advanced periphery in the 2000s.

Keywords: International Borrowing Cycles. Global and Regional Factors. Push and Pull Factors of Capital Flows. Financial Center Leverage Cycles.

JEL Codes: F30, F34, F65

 

 

 

Boom-Bust Capital Flow Cycles

2019, Graciela Laura Kaminsky, Working Paper Authors, Working Papers

May 2019

Graciela Laura Kaminsky

IIEP Working Paper 2019-7

Abstract: This paper examines the new trends in research on capital flows fueled by the 2007-2009 Global Crisis. Previous studies on capital flows focused on current-account imbalances and net capital flows. The Global Crisis changed that. The onset of this crisis was preceded by a dramatic increase in gross financial flows while net capital flows remained mostly subdued. The attention in academia zoomed in on gross inflows and outflows with special attention to cross border banking flows before the crisis erupted and the shift towards corporate bond issuance in its aftermath. The boom and bust in capital flows around the Global Crisis also stimulated a new area of research: capturing the “global factor.” This research adopts two different approaches. The traditional literature on the push-pull factors, which before the crisis was mostly focused on monetary policy in the financial center as the “push factor,” started to explore what other factors contribute to the comovement of capital flows as well as to amplify the role of monetary policy in the financial center on capital flows to the periphery. This new research focuses on global banks’ leverage, risk appetite, and global uncertainty. Since the “global factor” is not known, a second branch of the literature has captured this factor indirectly using dynamic common factors extracted from actual capital flows or movements in asset prices.

Keywords: The Global Crisis, Capital flow cycles, global banks, “push” and “pull” factors, corporate borrowing, global factors, dynamic latent factor models.

JEL Codes: F30, F34, F65

 

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