Emerging and Frontier Markets: Capital Flows, Risks, and Growth

Call for Papers
Emerging and Frontier Markets: Capital Flows, Risks, and Growth
Cartagena, Colombia
May 4-5, 2020

During the last two decades, emerging and frontier markets have received substantial capital inflows and accumulated debts both in their own currency and in foreign currency. The canonical recipe for an emerging market crisis involves a large dose of public as well as private indebtedness, often with significant misallocation of capital into unproductive projects. These classic vulnerabilities, combined with weak banks, budget deficits, corruption, political constraints, and domestic and external misalignments, preceded many past financial crises.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with support from the Banco de la República Colombia, will convene a conference in Cartagena, Colombia on May 4-5, 2020 to explore growth dynamics, capital flows, and associated risks in emerging markets. The program committee consists of Mark Aguiar (Princeton and NBER), Cristina Arellano (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and NBER), and Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan (University of Maryland and NBER).

The conference will include presentations and discussions of research papers as well as a panel discussion of policy issues facing emerging and frontier markets. The panel members will include Juan José Echavarría, Governor of the Banco de la República Colombia, Gita Gopinath, Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund, Maurice Obstfeld, Class of 1958 Professor of Economics at the University of California-Berkeley and NBER Research Associate, and José Darío Uribe, President of the Fondo Latinoamericano de Reservas.

The conference organizers welcome submissions of research papers on topics that relate to emerging and frontier markets including:

The relation between foreign currency debt, investment, and productivity
Capital flows and the extent of international arbitrage
The role of capital flows and global financial cycles in boom-bust cycles
Sovereign, bank, and corporate debt crises
Policy responses to risks originating in domestic or global financial markets
The growth-volatility-capital flow nexus
The interaction of monetary policy and capital flows
Implications of the growing role of emerging markets in the world economy

Research papers may be submitted at:
https://papers.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=EFMs20

Submissions from scholars who are early in their career, with and without NBER affiliations, and from under-represented groups are encouraged.

The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2020. Authors chosen to present papers will be notified by February 15, 2020. The NBER will pay travel and hotel expenses for two authors per paper. Questions about this meeting may be addressed to confer@nber.org.