This paper investigates the impact of tourism policy on employment, using the Tourism Development Policy (TDP) implemented in the Argentinean province of Salta during the years of 2003 to 2010 as a case study. Following the Synthetic Control Method for comparative case studies, we use a...

This paper dwells on the Eurozone woes and addresses the origins of the transition from a fictitious boom to a painful bust by unravelling (i) the supply-side structural imbalances that formed the core-periphery economic divide, and (ii) the necessity of the periphery's sovereign debt to finance...

This paper analyzes reforms and counter-reforms in Bolivia in recent decades and their effects on the policymaking process (PMP) and productivity. Bolivia s PMP has shifted from a formal representative democracy to a participative and direct type of democracy where street protest and other...

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries’ growth would benefit from reductions in barriers to trade. However, the empirical basis for judging trade reforms is weak. Econometrics are mostly ad hoc; results are typically not judged against models; policies are poorly measured;...

This paper uses a model of intergenerational accounting to simulate the intergenerational distribution of oil wealth in Venezuela. Venezuelan oil production does not seem to follow an optimal extraction path. Nevertheless, this is true if we do not consider what the government does with the...

This paper studies from an empirical and theoretical perspective the systemic and bank-level effects of imposing reserve requirements (RR) in foreign currency in an economy with a heavily dollarized financial system. The paper empirically characterizes banks responses to the RR carried out by...

We study the distributional consequences of COVID-19 by using a stock-flow consistent agent-based model that captures some of the aspects of pandemic-related lockdowns. In particular, the model distinguishes between "essential" and "non-essential" industries, between jobs that can be done from...

As Latin America and the Caribbeans "Great Liberalization" reaches its 30th anniversary, we revisit the trade and growth debate by updating and expanding Estevadeordal and Taylors 2013 paper. To better understand the regions heterogeneity of policies and outcomes, we extend this analysis to...

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

For sufficiently low abatement costs many countries might undertake significant emission reductions even without any international agreement on emission reductions. We consider a situation where a coalition of countries does not cooperate on emission reductions but cooperates on the development...