Brazil has had a long period of high inflation. It peaked around 100 percent per year in 1964, decreased until the first oil shock (1973), but accelerated again afterward, reaching levels above 100 percent on average between 1980 and 1994. This last period coincided with severe balance of...

After the economic reforms that followed the National Revolution of the 1950s, Bolivia seemed positioned for sustained growth. Indeed, it achieved unprecedented growth from 1960 to 1977. The rapid accumulation of debt due to persistent deficits and a fixed exchange rate policy during the 1970s...

Brazil experienced one of the most severe recessions in its history from 2014 to 2016. Following a pattern shown for previous economic downturns in other countries, the Brazilian recession was preceded by a substantial increase in household debt from 2003 to 2014. This study utilizes a novel...

This paper analyzes the relationship between capital account liberalization and macroeconomic volatility using Brazil as a case study. The paper provides several stylized facts regarding the evolution of capital flows and controls in Brazil in the last three decades. We conclude that,...

Conditional yield skewness is an important summary statistic of the state of the economy. It exhibits pronounced variation over the business cycle and with the stance of monetary policy, and a tight relationship with the slope of the yield curve. Most importantly, variation in yield skewness has...

In this paper, we develop a novel dataset of weekly economic conditions indices for the 50 U.S. states going back to 1987 based on mixed-frequency dynamic factor models with weekly, monthly, and quarterly variables that cover multiple dimensions of state economies. We show that there is...

It is widely suggested that there is some relationship between banking crises and recessions. We assess whether there is evidence for interdependency between recessions and banking crises using both non-parametric tests and unconditional bivariate probit models and find strong evidence for...

When Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in April 1933, he converted what had been effectively real government debt into nominal government debt to open the door to unbacked fiscal expansion. We argue that he followed a state-contingent fiscal rule that ran nominal-debt-financed primary...