Regional trade in South America since independence has long been much smaller than would be expected if geography were the only constraint on trade. Several potential explanations exist: low technological and demand complementarities; low productivity; high natural and policy barriers to trade....

After decades of trial, error, and occasional regress the pieces of a successful Latin American economic model can be seen scattered among the leading economies of the region. The most traditional macroeconomic maladies of the emerging world - such as chronic fiscal imbalances and monetary...

This paper examines the patterns of defaults, renegotiations, and final settlements on foreign borrowing of several Latin American governments in the interwar period. One goal of the paper is to provide a detailed historical account of the borrowing and renegotiation experience of five Latin...

We study how political constraints, characterized by the degree of flexibility to choose fiscal policy, affect the probability of sovereign default. To that end, we relax the assumption that policymakers always repay their debt in the dynamic model of fiscal policy developed by Battaglini and...

The Baring Crisis is the nineteenth century's most famous sovereign debt crisis. Few studies, however, have attempted to understand the extent to which the crisis mattered for countries other than Argentina and England. Using a new database consisting of more than 15,000 observations of weekly...

This paper shows that the Russian 1998 crisis had a big impact on capital flows to Emerging Market Economies, EMs, especially in Latin America, and that the impact of the Russian shock differs quite markedly across EMs. To illustrate this statement, we compare the polar cases of Chile and...

Latin American portfolio inflows show a strong tendency to revert to a natural level, KF*, over medium-run horizons. Deviations of actual flows from KF* provide policymakers with a real-time predictor of future flows, sudden stops and vulnerability to global shocks. Analysis of short-run...

Forestation is viewed as an important means of removing CO₂ from the atmosphere and thereby reducing net CO₂ emissions. But how much CO₂ can be removed, and at what cost? Focusing on forested and forestable areas in South America, and using spatially disaggregated data, we estimate a...