While planes were grounded, capital flew out of emerging market economies in response to the acceleration in the spread of the virus in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Was this capital flight predictable once you account for the sudden deterioration in the global financial environment? In this post we present a model that helps to think about how financial conditions and international capital flows are linked. We then apply this methodology to events observed between March and May 2020, and find that the model predicted a large increase in the likelihood of capital flight. However, the scale of outflows ... (full story)