The paper presents a new database on sovereign debt in the Americas, describing the sources used and briefly discussing several methodological issues. The paper also highlights major trends in level and composition of public debt in the Americas, discussing debt dollarization in detail

Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address...

In this paper, we examine how the business and interest rate cycles in developed countries affect FDI to developing countries. After aggregating flows into three big source areas (the U. S. , Europe and Japan), we find FDI flows to be countercyclical with respect to both output and interest rate...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. The paper shows that state-owned banks located in developing countries have fiscal costs because they are characterized by lower returns than...

This paper shows that a large fraction of the variability of emerging market bond spreads is explained by the evolution of global factors such as risk appetite (as reflected in the spread of high yield corporate bonds in developed markets), global liquidity (measured by the international...

An analysis of the performance of the global financial safety net during the 2008-2009 crisis, and an evaluation of its new components, indicates that, from an emerging markets perspective, the net remains full of holes despite recent stitches. This paper therefore proposes an effective and...

The role of regional integration agreements as a determinant of the location of FDI has become an increasingly relevant issue for emerging economies. In Latin America, the largest effects are likely to be associated with the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). In this regard, there are a...

In recent years, Latin American banking sectors have experienced an accelerated process of concentration and foreign penetration that has prompted diverse views regarding its implications for the competitive behavior of banks and for the financial stability of the system as a whole. Exploiting a...

This paper studies the impact of regional integration agreements (RIAs) on the location of foreign direct investment (FDI), using data on bilateral outward FDI stocks from the OECD International Direct Investment Statistics. The dataset covers FDI from 20 source countries, all of them from the...

Substantial attention has been paid in recent years to the risk of maturity mismatch in emerging markets. Although this risk is microeconomic in nature, the evidence advanced thus far has taken the form of macro correlations. This paper empirically evaluates this mechanism at the micro level by...