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.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, the world has undergone a major shift in thinking about the appropriate economic role of the state. Privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has been at the heart of this change. The track record on privatization, however, is still very limited. This...

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) La opinión convencional es que los tipos de cambio fijos permiten una mayor disciplina fiscal que los tipos flexibles, pero las experiencias recientes en Europa, la experiencia de los países subsaharianos en los años 80 y los antecedentes de los...

The paper explores the incidence of sudden stops in capital flows on the incentives for building national institutions that secure property rights in a world where sovereign defaults are possible equilibrium outcomes. Also thepaper builds upon the benchmark model of sovereign default and direct...

Conventional wisdom claims that fixed exchange rates provide more fiscal discipline than do flexible rates, but the recent experiences in Europe, the record of Sub-Saharan countries in the 1980s, and the history of stabilization attempts in Latin America cast empirical doubts on this wisdom. To...