Academic Research on Capital Account

• Capital account liberalization, financial depth, and economic growth Klein, M. W., & Olivei, G. P. (2008). Capital account liberalization, financial depth, and economic growth.Journal of international money and finance,27(6), 861-875. We show a statistically significant and economically relevant effect of open capital accounts on financial depth and economic growth in a cross-section of countries over the periods 19861995 and 19761995. Countries having open capital accounts had a significantly greater increase in financial depth and, over the 20-year period, greater economic growth. These results, however, are largely driven by the developed countries included in the sample. The observed failure of capital account liberalization to promote financial deepening among developing countries suggests potentially important policy implications concerning the desirability of opening up the capital account. 
• Capital account liberalization and economic performance: survey and synthesis Edison, H. J., Klein, M. W., Ricci, L. A., & Slk, T. (2004). Capital account liberalization and economic performance: survey and synthesis.IMF Staff Papers,51(2), 220-256. This paper surveys the literature on the effects of capital account openness and stock market liberalization on economic growth and provides a synthesis in which we reconcile some of the different results presented in the literature. Various empirical measures used to gauge the presence of controls on capital account transactions and the liberalization of equity markets are discussed. We compare detailed measures of capital account controls that attempt to capture the intensity of enforcement with other indicators that simply capture whether controls are present. A detailed review of the literature is followed by an empirical section in which we trace the divergence in published results to differences in country coverage, sample periods, indicators of liberalization, and control variables across studies. Specifically, we show that when an institutional variable such as government reputation is added to the specification, the significance of capital account openness vanishes. Also, we demonstrate that enriching the specification by allowing for nonlinearities helps explain why different studies that ignore the nonlinear nature of the relationship find different results. 
• Capital account liberalization: What do cross country studies tell us? Eichengreen, B. (2001). Capital account liberalization: What do crosscountry studies tell us?.The world bank economic review,15(3), 341-365. Capital account liberalization, it is fair to say, remains one of the most controversial and least understood policies of our day. One reason is that different theoretical perspectives have very different implications for the desirability of liberalizing capital flows. Another is that empirical analysis has failed to yield conclusive results. 
• Capital account liberalization: Theory, evidence, and speculation Henry, P. B. (2007). Capital account liberalization: Theory, evidence, and speculation.Journal of Economic Literature,45(4), 887-935. Research on the macroeconomic impact of capital account liberalization finds few, if any, robust effects of liberalization on real variables. In contrast to the prevailing wisdom, I argue that the textbook theory of liberalization holds up quite well to a critical reading of this literature. Most papers that find no effect of liberalization on real variables tell us nothing about the empirical validity of the theory because they do not really test it. This paper explains why it is that most studies do not really address the theory they set out to test. It also discusses what is necessary to test the theory and examines papers that have done so. Studies that actually test the theory show that liberalization has significant effects on the cost of capital, investment, and economic growth. 
• Capital account liberalization as a signal Bartolini, L., & Drazen, A. (1996).Capital account liberalization as a signal (No. w5725). National bureau of economic research. We present a model in which a government's current capital controls policy signals future policies. Controls on capital outflows evolve in response to news on technology, conditional on government attitudes towards taxation of capital. When there is uncertainty over government types, a policy of liberal capital outflows sends a favorable signal that may trigger a capital inflow. This prediction is consistent with the experience of several countries that have liberalized their capital account