This paper was prepared for the Seminar The New Wave of Capital Inflows: Sea Change or Tide? Annual Meetings of the Board of Governors, Inter-American Development Bank and Inter-American Investment CorporationWill capital inflows boom again in Latin America as countries recover from the 1998-99...

This paper uses household data from two cities in Panama to evaluate the determinants of the tenure decision in the context of two models. The key factors explaining the decision to rent or own are those associated with the family's lifecycle, while the choice between buying a complete house and...

This paper focuses on the design of successful bank restructuring programs in Latin America, a region where banking crises have been frequent in the past two decades. In each episode, Latin American policymakers have had to act under the severe constraints imposed on developing countries, which...

East Asia and Latin America have diverged in several dimensions in the past three decades. This paper compares household saving behavior in two countries in each region (Mexico, Peru, Thailand and Taiwan). We make four contributions. First, we provide the first comparisons of savings in these...

In this paper, It has been addressed this question using firm-level panel data from 12 developing countries. It was also developed a summary index of the efficiency of investment allocation that measures whether, and to what extent, investment funds are going to firms with a higher marginal...

Financial frictions are a central element of most of the models that the literature on emerging markets crises has proposed for explaining the Sudden Stop phenomenon. To date, few studies have aimed to examine the quantitative implications of these models and to integrate them with an...