In recent years, Latin American banking sectors have experienced an accelerated process of concentration and foreign penetration that has prompted diverse views regarding its implications for the competitive behavior of ...

The rise and fall of Argentina’s currency board illustrates the extent to which the advantages of hard pegs have been overstated. The currency board did provide nominal stability and boosted financial intermediation, at ...

In the late currency board years, Argentina faced a real exchange rate adjustment through price deflation amidst growing devaluation expectations. Using a firm-level panel database to analyze the incidence of these factors ...

This paper explores sources of deposit dollarization unrelated to standard moral hazard arguments. We develop a model in which banks choose the optimal currency composition of their liabilities. We argue that the equal ...

The principal focus of this chapter is on sovereign defaults on external debt in the 1990s and the lessons that have been learned. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. Section II explains the meaning of debt ...

El índice de demanda laboral es elaborado por la Universidad Torcuato Di Tella desde agosto de 2002. La motivación para la elaboración del índice fue la falta de un indicador mensual que reflejara la situación del ...

This paper develops a simple game between the IMF a county and a set of atomistic private investors. The model is motivated by the case of Argentina. Under reasonable assumptions, the one shot game has no Nash equilibrium ...

We propose a new test, derived from a set of variance decompositions of a structural VAR, for the success of inflation targeting. In contrast to standard sacrifice ratios this test considers changes in the structure of ...

The paper analyzes cyclical comovements in the Mercosur area differentiating idiosyncratic from common shocks. In the Mercosur (or any region for that matter) shocks can be country-specific, affecting only one country or ...

How will the creation of the FTAA affect FDI from the rest of the world to the region? What are the implications of FTAA for a country such as Mexico whose preferential access to the US may be diluted? Would the effect be ...