This article 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 co-movement of capital flows as well as to amplify the role of monetary policy in the financial center on capital flows. 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.
Article
Charles Ka Yui Leung and Cho Yiu Joe Ng
This article summarizes research on the macroeconomic aspects of the housing market. In terms of the macroeconomic stylized facts, this article demonstrates that with respect to business cycle frequency, there was a general decrease in the association between macroeconomic variables (MV), such as the real GDP and inflation rate, and housing market variables (HMV), such as the housing price and the vacancy rate, following the global financial crisis (GFC). However, there are macro-finance variables, such as different interest rate spreads, that exhibited a strong association with the HMV following the GFC. For the medium-term business cycle frequency, some but not all patterns prevail. These “new stylized facts” suggest that a reconsideration and refinement of existing “macro-housing” theories would be appropriate. This article also provides a review of the corresponding academic literature, which may enhance our understanding of the evolving macro-housing–finance linkage.
Article
Facundo Abraham, Juan J. Cortina, and Sergio L. Schmukler
There has been substantial debate about the expansion of global non-financial corporate debt after the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008–2009. But the main facts and policy challenges discussed in the literature are yet to be uncovered and summarized. Understanding the trends and issues can help readers gauge how large the growth of this type of financing has been, as well as the risks that more non-financial corporate debt might entail.
Non-financial corporate debt steadily increased after the GFC, especially in emerging economies. Between 2008 and 2018, corporate debt rose from 56 to 96% of gross domestic product (GDP) in emerging economies whereas it grew at the same rate as GDP in developed economies. Non-financial corporate debt after the crisis was mainly issued through bond markets, and its growth can be largely attributed to accommodative monetary policies in developed economies.
Although the growth in debt financing has some positive aspects for emerging market firms in terms of expanding financing and diversifying financing sources, it also amplified solvency risks and firms’ exposure to changes in market conditions. Slower global economic growth worldwide as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic could impose significant costs to emerging market firms that increased reliance on debt financing.
Policy makers in emerging economies face challenges to mitigate overall risks and to contain corporate vulnerability in the non-financial sector. Because capital markets have an important role in the expansion of financial activity and are not as regulated as banks, policy makers have limited tools to alleviate the risks of growing non-financial corporate debt.
