The paper presents a new database on sovereign debt in the Americas, describing the sources used and briefly discussing several methodological issues. The paper also highlights major trends in level and composition of public debt in the Americas, discussing debt dollarization in detail.

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se muestra que buena parte del grado de variación de los diferenciales de intereses de los bonos de mercados emergentes obedece al desenvolvimiento de factores mundiales tales como la disposición a aceptar riesgos (según se aprecia en...

This paper studies the impact of regional integration agreements (RIAs) on the location of foreign direct investment (FDI), using data on bilateral outward FDI stocks from the OECD International Direct Investment Statistics. The dataset covers FDI from 20 source countries, all of them from the...

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este documento se revisa la obra publicada teórica y empírica sobre el papel de los bancos propiedad del Estado y también se presentan algunos resultados nuevos y un análisis de validez. Se muestra que la banca propiedad del Estado de países en...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. The paper shows that state-owned banks located in developing countries have fiscal costs because they are characterized by lower returns than...

This paper shows that a large fraction of the variability of emerging market bond spreads is explained by the evolution of global factors such as risk appetite (as reflected in the spread of high yield corporate bonds in developed markets), global liquidity (measured by the international...

In this paper, we examine how the business and interest rate cycles in developed countries affect FDI to developing countries. After aggregating flows into three big source areas (the U. S. , Europe and Japan), we find FDI flows to be countercyclical with respect to both output and interest rate...

Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address...

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En los últimos años, los sectores bancarios latinoamericanos han experimentado un acelerado proceso de concentración y penetración foránea, lo cual ha suscitado diversos puntos de vista en cuanto a sus implicaciones para la conducta competitiva de...

The role of regional integration agreements as a determinant of the location of FDI has become an increasingly relevant issue for emerging economies. In Latin America, the largest effects are likely to be associated with the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). In this regard, there are a...