Capital Controls: Myth and Reality - A Portfolio Balance Approach

In this note we summarize our recent paper, where we delved into the details of this apple-to-oranges problem with the aim of defining a minimum common ground. We begin our analysis by explicitly documenting the kinds of measures that are construed as capital controls. Along the way, we describe the more drastic differences across countries/episodes and between controls on inflows and outflows as well a more subtle differences in types of inflow or outflow controls. Given that success is measured differently across studies, we standardize (to some degree) the results across studies. Inasmuch as possible, we highlight episodes that are less well known than the heavily analyzed cases of Chile and Malaysia. Our results are based on a meta-analysis of 37 empirical studies.