Macroeconomic policy decisions in real-time are based on the assessment of current and future economic conditions. Crucially, these assessments are made difficult by the presence of incomplete and noisy data. The problem is more acute for emerging market economies, where most economic data are...

How do economic crisis a§ect national-level policy choices? Are technocratic advisors more likely to enter government during periods of severe economic volatility? If so, how does such governance a§ect economic policymaking and social responsiveness? In this paper, I evaluate the role of...

1985 saw the publication of Carlos Díaz-Alejandro's classic article, “Good-Bye Financial Repression, Hello Financial Crash” (1985). Writing in the wake of drastic financial blowups in the Southern Cone, Díaz-Alejandro nonetheless argued that “a believable alternative system could be...

Latin American countries experienced important changes over the last decade. The implementation of fiscal reforms, public debt reduction and the high level of accumulated reserves gave them more policy space than in the past. As a result, Latin American countries were able to implement...

These notes examine the international crisis by analyzing it through Latin American lenses. The exercise consists in interpreting some key facts of the current global crisis in the light of what we know about volatility, crisis and stabilization policies in Latin America. The exercise has an...

High inflation economies have ultimately been successful in stabilising their prices using the exchange rate as a nominal anchor. Besides stabilization, these recent examples have shown boom-recession cycles, contrary to what can be expected from (pure) money-based stabilizations. Various...

High inflation economies, especially the Latin American cases like Argentina and Brazil, have ultimately been successful in stabilising their prices using the exchange rate as a nominal anchor. Contrary to conventional wisdom inflation in these cases has not been reduced at the cost of temporary...

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of economic policy and structural change on gender inequality in employment and economic opportunities for a set of 18 Latin American countries over the time period 1990-2010. We use three different methodologies to explore this question:...