"This paper studies the factors banks perceive as drivers and obstacles to financing small and medium enterprises (SMEs), focusing on the role of competition and the institutional framework. Using a survey of banks in Argentina and Chile, the paper shows that, despite alleged differences in the...

"This paper relaxes some key assumptions in the probabilistic approach to fiscal sustainability. First, the authors identify structural breaks over the sample period used to estimate the covariance matrix of the shocks to the debt ratios. Second, the assumption of normality of the shocks is...

"The authors estimate returns to schooling in urban Argentina for a 10-year period. In addition to comparable earnings functions, they also estimate the returns using quantile regression analysis to detect differences in the returns across the distribution. Over time, men in higher quantiles...

"There has not been much change in the premium to primary education, while the returns to secondary education increased, but by less than the premium to university. The returns to incomplete university also increased significantly. There is a signal that there might be credentialism at the...

"The authors jointly analyze the static, selection, and dynamic effects of domestic, foreign, and state ownership on bank performance. They argue that it is important to include indicators of all the relevant governance effects in the same model. "Nonrobustness" checks (which purposely exclude...

"Beginning in the late 1980s, Argentina implemented a series of reforms that were revolutionary in speed and scope, including trade liberalization. After the implementation of these policies, a record number of antidumping petitions came forward. Under a situation of high inflation, the...

"This paper estimates the relationship between family background, school characteristics, and student achievement in primary school in two Latin American countries, Argentina and Colombia, as well as several comparison countries. The database used is the student-level international achievement...

"Levy-Yeyati, Martinez Peria, and Schmukler 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....

"Argentina was a pioneer of infrastructure reform in the early 1990s. The social dimension of infrastructure services was typically overlooked in the reform process. However, social sensitivities often resurfaced in the years that followed, leading to a series of ad hoc social policy measures...