Although the international crisis was initially seen as an event limited to a particular segment of the financial systems of central economies, it rapidly escalated and became global through different transmission channels, raising doubts over the hypothesis of the so-called decoupling. Latin...

We study the interest rate spread of the Argentine financial system during the last eighteen years. We analyze Granger causality of selected variables, and estimate econometric models that relate spread to macroeconomic and microeconomic factors. Resuls indicate that output growth and...

The document focuses on the econometric treatment of macro panels, known in literature as panel time series. This new approach rejects the assumption of slopes' homogeneity and handles nonstationarity. It also recognizes that the presence of cross-section dependence (CSD), i.e. some correlation...

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the banking system, over and beyond its credit function, has a significant impact on per capita GDP by providing means of payment. An annual database of 85 countries spanning the 1980-2008 period is exploited to this end. On the descriptive front,...

The presence of seasonal fluctuations (regular behavior along the year related to weather or institutional factors) invalidates monthly (quarterly) comparisons. In turn, since inter-annual variations depend on the comparison basis being used, they could provide very little information to the...

The goal of this paper is to provide up-to-date worldwide evidence on the short-term relationship between credit changes and output changes. Standard correlation methods, stateof-the-art panel Granger causality tests, and panel regressions were applied on a maximum sample of 144 countries over...

The role of the exchange rate under inflation targeting (IT) remains an unresolved issue in literature and policy discussions -and a challenge for central banks implementing IT, especially in developing countries. This paper aims at assessing whether there is a relation between the nominal...