This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on wo quasi-natural experiments" in history, the division of...

Two recent papers (Gonçalves and Carvalho, 2009; and Brito, 2010) hold contradictory views regarding the role of inflation targeting during periods of disinflation. The first paper claims that inflation targeting reduces sacrifice ratios-i.e., the ratio of output losses to the change in trend...

In recent years, five of the main economies in Latin America -Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Peru- have adopted Inflation Targeting regimes. In the context of these converging monetary strategies, would the IT nations in the region be better o adopting a common currency? Would they be...

This paper challenges the conventional view according to which disinflations in Latin America -even from low and moderate peaks- have been carried out at no cost to output. After suggesting a new methodology that overcomes some of the shortcomings of the traditional methods used to measure the...

This paper studies the behavior of several macroeconomic variables during disinflationary episodes in Latin-America and the Caribbean (LAC). In particular, it focuses on disinflations from low and moderate peaks for the period 1973-2001. The methodology used for studying the average behavior of...

Why is that the achievements of some disinflations from low and moderate peaks are longlived, whereas in others the gains in the inflationary front dissipate quickly? Based on an index of the sustainability of disinflations proposed in the paper, various competing explanations of what determines...

Based on the counting of Help-wanted advertisements in print newspapers, we present national vacancy indexes and vacancy rates for Colombia. These series will allow tackling a myriad of questions related to the functioning of the labor markets in emerging economies, where such datasets were not...

Abstract After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange...

This paper presents a novel monthly dataset of job vacancies in Bogota between 1960 and 2010. The dataset was constructed by counting the number of help-wanted announcements published in the most important newspaper with national circulation-namely, El Tiempo. We describe the methodology used to...