This paper argues that current account statistics may provide a poor indication for the real evolution of a country's net foreign assets. This may be due to a series of factors including the mismeasurement of FDI, unreported trade of insurance or liquidity services and debt relief. Because of...

In this paper, we introduce the first comprehensive database on sovereign debt systematically compiled to ensure comparability, for all countries in the Americas, and use this new data to highlight the main stylized facts regarding sovereign debt for developing America in the last two decades....

This paper studies the effect of inflation on the operation of financial markets, and shows how the ability of financial intermediaries to distinguish among heterogenous firms is reduced as inflation rises. This point is illustrated by presenting a simple model where inflation affects firms`...

This paper estimates bond-by-bond haircuts realized investor losses in recent debt restructurings in Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Ecuador, Argentina, and Uruguay. We consider both external and domestic retructurings. Haircuts are computed as the percentage difference between the present values of...

This paper investigates the long run behavior of real exchange rates in nineteen countries of Latin America over the period 1970 - 2006. Our data does not support the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis, implying that real shocks tend to have permanent effects on Latin America's real...

The volatile movements in commodity prices during the last years have raised new questions to be discussed in both policy and academic spheres. Up to the financial slump of the second quarter of 2008 commodity prices grew fast for several consecutive years in a highly volatile context. The...

This study gives a non-traditional framework for the evaluation of an asymmetric monetary association (such as dollarization). We discuss the relationship between real volatility and country risk and determine the necessary conditions for dollarization to improve social welfare. We concentrate...

In this paper we study the integration properties of some of the main macroeconomic series of Argentina. We present a robust methodology for the analysis of persistence of shocks affecting macroeconomic series and its consequences on the modeling of the cyclical and permanent components. Our...