Philipp Harms Livres

The book examines the significant rise in long-term private capital flows to developing countries following recent policy reforms, highlighting the disparity in investment distribution. While a few intermediate economies have attracted the majority of these investments, low-income countries remain largely overlooked by international investors. The analysis delves into the implications of this trend and explores potential strategies to address the investment gap, aiming to foster more equitable economic growth across diverse regions.

Philipp Harms presents the concepts and methods of modern international macroeconomics in a comprehensive yet accessible way. He motivates the topics discussed with regard to their practical relevance and enables the reader to assess the contributions of theoretical approaches and results. Among the topics covered are the determinants of current accounts and international capital flows, the mechanisms behind the fluctuations of real and nominal exchange rates as well as the scope and limits of economic policy in open economies. Real and monetary phenomena are analyzed within a coherent analytical framework, and the theoretical results are confronted with the available empirical evidence. The English edition updates the data presented in the German version, adopts new conceptual developments, and repeatedly refers to the recent financial crises.

We show that including distribution costs into a general equilibrium model of international portfolio choice contributes to explaining the "home bias" in international equity investment. Our model is able to replicate observed investment positions for a wide range of parameter values, even if agents have an incentive to hedge labor income risk by purchasing foreign equity. This is because the existence of a retail sector affects both the correlation of domestic returns with the domestic price level and the correlation between financial and nonfinancial income. -- International Financial Market Integration ; International Risk Sharing ; Home Bias

We argue that a higher share of the private sector in a country's external debt raises the incentive to stabilize the exchange rate. We present a simple model in which exchange rate volatility does not affect agents' welfare if all the debt is incurred by the government. Once we introduce private banks who borrow in foreign currency and lend to domestic firms, the monetary authority has an incentive to dampen the distributional consequences of exchange rate fluctuations. Our empirical results support the hypothesis that not only the level, but also the composition of foreign debt matters for exchange-rate policy. -- Exchange rate regimes ; foreign debt ; monetary policy

Philipp Harms vermittelt die wichtigsten Konzepte und Ergebnisse der Internationalen Makroökonomik in einer umfassenden und zugleich zugänglichen Weise. In einer problembezogenen, an der praktischen Relevanz der behandelten Themen orientierten Darstellung führt er den Leser an moderne theoretische Ansätze heran und versetzt ihn in die Lage, deren Erklärungsbeitrag und Defizite kritisch zu diskutieren. Inhaltlich schlägt er einen Bogen von den Determinanten internationaler Investitionen über die Mechanismen, mit denen sich Schwankungen realer und nominaler Wechselkurse erklären lassen, bis zu der Frage, welche Möglichkeiten und Grenzen sich der Wirtschaftspolitik in offenen Volkswirtschaften bieten. Realwirtschaftliche und monetäre Phänomene werden dabei in einem kohärenten, auf intertemporalen Optimierungskalkülen basierenden Analyserahmen betrachtet, und die daraus entwickelten theoretischen Ergebnisse werden mit der verfügbaren empirischen Evidenz konfrontiert.