The paper applies methods of functional data analysis – functional auto-regression, principal components and canonical correlations – to the study of the dynamics of interest rate curve. In addition, it introduces a novel statistical tool based on the singular value decomposition...

This paper considers the dynamics for interest rate processes within the Heath, Jarrow and Morton (1992) specification. It is well known that one of the difficulties in using this specification for estimation is the non-Markovian nature of the dynamics. The paper focuses on a fairly broad family...

This paper develops a theory of outside ownership where such an ownership arrangement mitigates an external finance problem. Part of the gains from outside ownership accrue to asset owners which determines the asset value. The theory provides a context to analyze asset ownership and asset values...

This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the socialwelfare loss that results from the regime's inability to...

This paper develops a computable dynamic general equilibrium model in which corporate demand for liquidity is endogenously determined. In the model liquidity demand is motivated by moral hazard as in Holmstrom and Tirole (1998). As a result of incorporating agency cost and endogenously...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the sources of funding for the firms of an economy without stock market. Once the available and relevant financial sources for a Uruguayan firm are defined, their determinants are analyzed through cross section econometric models. The analysis casts out...

This paper revisits the Chilean experience with dollarization, indexation and nominalization in the 1958-2003 period. The purpose is to understand how Chile generally avoided dollarization and actually dedollarized in the 80s in order to draw some lessons for other countries. We find that many...

Financial dollarization has been placed at the forefront of the policy debate in many developing economies, for reasons that include its influence on inflation performance and, most prominently, the currency imbalance and associated financial fragility that it introduces for the economy as a...

In continuous time specifications, the prices of interest rate derivative securities depend crucially on the mean reversion parameter of the associated interest rate diffusion equation. This parameter is well known to be subject to estimation bias when standard methods like maximum likelihood...

Yield spread between long and short bonds has been used to forecast economic activity for a long time and has yielded some positive results, particularly for the U.S. data. Recently it has been shown that the forecast can be improved by incorporating the economic activity variable into a term...