Imbalances For the Long Run

Abstract

Net exports and current account balances among developed countries, which contributed to the so called “global imbalances”, are highly persistent. Despite success along many dimensions, international business cycle models have difficulty replicating these salient, low-frequency features of international capital flows. In particular, net exports and current account balances are much more persistent in the data than in standard models. We document these important empirical facts about international capital flows. Further, we show that we can account for them with a parsimonious one-good two-country model with small, persistent differences in per capita GDP growth, matching those we observe among developed countries.