Financial wisdom says that a steady grasp on capital controls may be a good way to battle crises. It follows that control on capital inflows is tightened during a period of plenty and vice versa. But after rifling through data from several countries between 1995 and 2011, Andrés Fernández, Alessandro Rebucci and Martín Uribe found no significant changes in capital controls across a boom or lull period, implying that these policy measures are often acyclical.

Title: Are capital controls prudential? An Empirical Investigation

Source: The National Bureau of Economic Research