This paper investigates the role of structural reforms –privatization, financial reform and trade liberalization– as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main...

This Paper assesses the foreign lobbying forces behind the tariff preferences that the United States grants to Latin American countries. The basic framework is one developed by Grossman and Helpman (1994) that is extended to explain the relationship between foreign lobbying and tariff...

We survey the research on the effect of employment laws in developing countries, using papers published since 2004. The survey is further supported by cross-country correlation analyses. Both exercises show that developing countries with rigid employment laws tend to have larger informal sectors...

Africa and Latin America secured their independence from European colonial rule a century and half apart: most of Latin America after 1820 and most of Africa after 1960. Despite the distance in time and space, they share important similarities. In each case independence was followed by political...

Recent theories on the origins of crises put lending booms at the root of financial collapses. Yet lending booms may be a natural consequence of economic development and fluctuations. So, are lending booms dangerous? In this Paper, we investigate this question empirically using a broad sample of...

An interesting puzzle is that trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s has been associated with a sharp increase in the skill premium in both developed and developing countries. This is in contrast with neoclassical theory, according to which trade should increase the relative return of the...

We develop a common factor approach to reconstruct new business cycle indices for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico ("LAC-4") from an unprecedentedly comprehensive dataset spanning 135 years. We establish the robustness of our indices through a variety of tests, use the indices to explore...

In this essay we analyze the relation between long-term growth and institutional development. Relative backwardness has been a constant feature of the history of Latin America. In the wake of Independence the gap between Latin America and the industrializing world was already wide and widened...

This paper surveys the broad patterns of world trade in manufactures since about 1960. While the bulk of manufactured exports came initially from relatively few large industrial countries, developing countries have encroached seriously upon their markets in recent years. The newly industrialized...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the role played by domestic political incentives in the accumulation of large external debts by developing countries between 1972 and 1981. The theoretical model characterizes two equilibrium regimes. In one the borrower is on its...