This book focuses on experiences with and lessons learned from the sweeping reforms to the pension systems of Latin America and the Caribbean during the 1990s and early 2000s, which shifted the burden of old-age security from the public to the private sector. The book's main objective is to...

This paper studies the proposition that capital inflows tend to take the form of FDI -i.e., the share of FDI in total liabilities tends to be higher- in countries that are safer, more promising and with better institutions and policies. It finds that this view is patently wrong since it stands...

This paper investigates the relevance of business saving for private saving and investment around the world by constructing and exploiting a broad international, unbalanced panel of 64 countries over 1990-2012. The paper shows that businesses are the main contributors to private and national...

This paper studies the effect of government-backed partial credit guarantees on firms' performance. These guarantees are automatically granted to firms without enough collateral in order to lift their credit constraints. We put together a panel, covering the period 1997-2007, that combines data...

Using firm level data on 70,000 enterprises in 107 countries, this paper finds important effects of access to finance, business regulations, corruption, and to a lesser extent, infrastructure bottlenecks in explaining patterns of job creation at the firm level. The paper focuses on how the...

This paper presents a conceptual framework for explaining Credit Unions (CUs) loan delinquency and profitability in developing countries. It also offers an empirical estimation for a unique sample of CUs in Latin America.

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of public credit lines in promoting the performances of Brazilian firms. We focus on the impact of the credit lines managed by BNDES and FINEP in fostering growth measured in terms of employment, labor productivity and export. For this purpose, we use a...

Free Trade Agreements (FTA) attract significant interest, but after these treaties are signed not all exporters use them. We provide a model of heterogeneous utilization, also developing a novel method to estimate treaty-utilization costs. We later apply the model to estimate the evolution...

While Mexico has potential to grow rapidly, its economic growth has remained low for the past three decades. There is no consensus on the country's development path or on how to achieve specific goals. Since the policy debate remains ideological and lacks pragmatism, productive development...