Using panel co-integration techniques and a comprehensive dataset covering the period 1980-2013, this paper finds a positive and significant correlation between national saving and domestic investment rates in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The estimated correlation is approximately 0.39;...

The latest global financial and economic crisis reignited the debate on the costs and benefits of foreign bank presence. While discussions on the optimal financing model of foreign owned banks are ongoing, the consensus on the benefits of foreign banks presence is not a matter of dispute. Given...

This paper presents and describes a new dataset of capital control restrictions on both inflows and outflows of 10 categories of assets for 100 countries over the period 1995 to 2013. Building on the data first presented in Schindler (2009) and other datasets based on the analysis of the IMF's...

Integrated capital markets facilitate risk sharing across countries. Lower home bias in financial investments is an indicator of risk sharing. We highlight that existing indicators of equity home bias in the literature suffer from incomplete coverage because they consider only listed equities....

This paper investigates the major drivers of the public debt growth in 184 countries. Our analysis consists in a cross-country survey, which is conducted on the basis of the improved compilation of datasets on the central government debt for 2013. In order to differentiate between...

Between 2000 and 2013, Latin America has considerably reduced poverty (from 46.3% to 29.7% of the population). In this paper, we use synthetic panels to show that, despite progress, the region remains characterized by substantial vulnerability that also affects the rising middle-class. More...