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...

To study the joint decision of holding sovereign debt and reserves, we construct a stochastic dynamic equilibrium model that incorporates willingness-to-pay incentive problems. In this setup, debt and assets are not perfect substitutes, as reserves can be used even after a country has defaulted....

This paper examines South Korea's macroeconomic performance and experience with external debt during 1960-1986. Most of Korea's debt was accumulated during three periods: 1966-69, 1974-75 and 1979-81. Each involved an initial phase of economic difficulty and an slow-down in growth, followed by...

This paper deals with Latin America's experience with capital flows during the last decade and a half. It concentrates on a number of issues of increasing interest among academics and international observers, including the effect of capital inflows on domestic savings, the way in which capital...

A number of developing countries have run large and persistent current account deficits in both the late seventies/early eighties and in the early nineties, raising the issue of whether these persistent imbalances are sustainable. This paper puts forward a notion of current account...

By any standard, Bolivia's economic crisis in the 1980's has been extraordinary. Like its neighbors. Bolivia suffered from major external shocks, but the extent of economic collapse in the face of these shocks (including a hyperinflation during 1984-85) suggests that internal factors as well as...

In this paper we characterize empirically the comovements of macro variables typically observed in middle income countries, as well as the boom-bust cycle' that has been observed during the last two decades. We find that many countries that have liberalized their financial markets, have...

We document a striking empirical regularity: Latin American savings rates are as a rule substantially less procyclical than for OECD countries and in some cases are actually countercyclical. We build a non-representative agent intertemporal macroeconomic model that rationalizes this phenomenon...

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy have held the pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, and that it's the Iberian colonists' fault. Thus, modern analysts see today a more unequal Latin America...

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...