IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/2075.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How Integrated are World Capital Markets? Some New Tests

Author

Listed:
  • Maurice Obstfeld

Abstract

This paper present some new empirical evidence on the extent of world capital-market integration. The first set of tests carried out uses data from different countries to compare internationally expected marginal rates of substitution between consumption on different dates. If residents of different countries have access to a nominally risk-free bond denominated in dollars, say, their common expected marginal rate of substitution of future for present dollars should equal the gross nominal return on dollar bonds. Tests of the international equality of expected marginal substitution rates yield evidence consistent with a substantial degree of international capital-market integration after, but not before, 1973. These tests are naturally based on a particular model of intertemporal consumption choice, but direct estimation of the inter-country relationships implied by that model lends support to its assumptions. These last findings are relevant to the current debate in macroeconomics about the role of intertemporal substitution. The second set of tests conducted in this paper concerns correlations between countries' saving and investment rates. For a sample often countries, correlations between annual changes in saving and investment rates over the period 1948-1984 look quite similar to those found in quarterly data. Surprisingly, however, the correlation coefficients are often lower before the mid-1960s than afterward This finding throws further doubt on the interpretation of saving-investment correlation coefficients as structural parameters reflecting the response of domestic investment to shifts in national saving.

Suggested Citation

  • Maurice Obstfeld, 1986. "How Integrated are World Capital Markets? Some New Tests," NBER Working Papers 2075, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2075
    Note: ITI IFM
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w2075.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2075. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.