Corporate sectors in emerging markets have noticeably increased their reliance on foreign financing, presumably reflecting low global interest rates. The evidence also shows a rebalancing from bank loans towards bonds. To study these developments, this paper develops a dynamic open economy model...

The effectiveness of exchange rate adjustments depends critically on the extent to which depreciations "pass through" to inflation, an effect that is known as exchange rate pass-through (ERPT). In particular, if an exchange rate depreciation does not result in a lasting change in relative...

This paper documents an inverse U-shape in the evolution of wage inequality in Latin America since 1995, with a sharp reduction starting in 2002. The Gini coefficient of wages increased from 42 to 44 between 1995 and 2002 and declined to 39 by 2015. Between 2002 and 2015, the 90/10 log hourly...

This paper examines the role of disaster shock in a one-sector, representative agent dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE). First, it estimates a panel vector autoregresive (VAR) model for output, investment, trade balance, consumption, and country spread to capture the economic...

This paper examines whether elections, which are generally held on fixed dates, and banking crises explain the timing of tax reforms and the allocation of the additional tax burden. Using an original fine-grained dataset of tax reforms, the paper finds support for the role of these two sources...

This paper documents how informal employment in Mexico is countercyclical, lags the cycle and is negatively correlated to formal employment. This contributes to explaining why total employment in Mexico displays low cyclicality and variability over the business cycle when compared to Canada, a...

This paper studies the effect of demographic transitions on the economy of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The paper builds a model of multi-regions of the world and derives the path of macroeconomic variables including aggregate output, capital, labor and the saving rate as economies...

This paper shows that there is substantial comovement between prices of primary commodities such as oil, aluminum, maize, or copper and real exchange rates between developed economies such as Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom against the US dollar. The production of commodities is then...

Fiscal policy is procyclical in developing countries. An ample literature has explained this fact and explored its consequences for aggregate cyclical fluctuations. Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) are an important source of finance for governments and therefore play a role in the execution...