Latin American economies are exposed to ubstantial external vulnerability. Domestic imbalances and terms of trade shocks are often exacerbated by sudden financial distress. In this paper we explore ways of overcoming external vulnerability drawing lessons from a detailed comparison of the...

Most work showing the yield curve predicts future economic growth relies on post WWII data. We demonstrate that the yield curve has predictive content for most of the post Civil War period. This predictive ability, however, is closely related to the credibility of the monetary regime in place,...

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...

The literature gives evidence that term spreads help predict output growth, inflation, and interest rates. This paper integrates and explains these predictability results by using an affine term structure model with observable macroeconomic factors. The results suggest that consumers are willing...

This paper investigates the properties of optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a two sector small open economy. If the government can optimally select all possible distorting tax rates, then it can implement Pareto efficient outcomes and the Friedman Rule is found to be a necessary condition...

In this paper we incorporate the term structure of interest rates in a standard inflation forecast targeting framework. Learning about the transmission process of monetary policy is introduced by having heterogeneous agents - i.e. the central bank and private agents - who have different...

To date the cointegrating properties and the regime-switching behavior of the term structure are two separate strands of the literature. This paper integrates these lines of research and introduces regime shifts into a cointegrated VAR model. We argue that the short-run dynamics of the...

This paper analyzes price formation and dynamics according to the industry structure. It divides manufacturing industries of Mexico into two groups: perfectly and imperfectly competitive. The results show that imperfectly competitive industries predominate. Then this classification is used to...

There are two crucial conditions for cross-sectional aggregation of AR(1) parameters to produce long memory: 1) heterogeneity and 2) proximity to the unit root. We analyze role of moments, namely the mean and variance, of the distribution of the AR(1) coefficients in generating long memory. The...