The authors present a framework to analyze financial globalization. They argue that financial globalization needs to take into account the relation between money (particularly in its role as store of value), asset and factor price flexibility, and contractual and regulatory institutions....

The rise and fall of Argentina's currency board shows the extent to which the advantages of hard pegs have been overstated. The currency board did provide nominal stability and boosted financial intermediation, at the cost of endogenous financial dollarization, but did not foster monetary or...

The Argentine crisis witnessed, among other things, a deposit run, the suspension of deposit convertibility, and a "boom" in the stock market. The authors argue that this boom reflects the cost that depositors were willing to incur to get their money out of the banking system, in light of the...

Whereas conventional wisdom argues that markets shut down during crises, with sellers struggling to find buyers, we find that markets continue to operate during financial turmoil, even in narrow and volatile emerging economies. Simple event studies indicate that both trading volume and trading...

The authors argue that the cross-market premium (the ratio between the domestic and the international market price of cross-listed stocks) provides a valuable measure of international financial integration, reflecting accurately the factors that segment markets and inhibit price arbitrage....

This paper analyzes the effects of capital controls and crises on international financial integration, using data on stocks from emerging economies that trade in domestic and international markets. The cross-market premium (the ratio between the domestic and international market price of...

In recent years the term "fear of floating" has been used to describe exchange rate regimes that, while officially flexible, in practice intervene heavily to avoid sudden or large depreciations. However, the data reveals that in most cases (and increasingly so in the 2000s) intervention has been...

The authors show that systemic risk exerts a significant impact on the behavior of depositors, sometimes overshadowing their responses to standard bank fundamentals. Systemic risk can affect market discipline both regardless of and through bank fundamentals. First, worsening systemic conditions...

This paper reviews the determinants of Latin America's uneven growth based on an accounting decomposition that breaks down countries' growth (relative to the world) into three trade-related channels: (i) an export pull measuring the traction exerted by the country's exports, (ii) an external...

Latin America’s historically low saving rates and sub-par growth performance raise the question of whether the region should save more to grow faster. Economists generally resist acknowledging a policy-exploitable causal connection going from saving to growth because domestic saving is...