This paper uses an instrumental variable approach to study whether public debt has a causal effect on economic growth in a sample of OECD countries. The results are consistent with the existing literature that has found a negative correlation between debt and growth. However, the link between...

This paper checks whether state-ownership of banks is correlated with ending behavior over the business cycle and finds that their lending is less responsive to macroeconomic shocks than the lending of private banks. The paper tests whether this is due to the presence of quot;lazyquot; public...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. After having discussed whether there is a theoretical justification for the presence of state-owned banks, the paper focuses on their...

This paper uses a new dataset to reassess the relationship between bank ownership and bank performance, providing separate estimations for developing and industrial countries. It finds that state-owned banks located in developing countries tend to have lower profitability and higher costs than...

This paper builds a new dataset of bank ownership and bank performance covering approximately 50,000 observations for 119 countries over the 1995-2002 period. Next it uses the dataset to reassess the relationship between bank ownership and bank performance providing separated estimations for...

Latin America suffered a profound state crisis in the 1980s, which prompted not only the wave of macroeconomic and deregulation reforms known as the Washington Consensus, but also a wide variety of institutional or 'second generation' reforms. 'The State of State Reform in Latin America' reviews...

Regional integration initiatives have long been part of the world economic landscape. In Latin America, integration flourished in the early post-war era but then lost momentum until the 1990s, when there was a new wave of initiatives ranging from free trade areas to customs unions. This Report...

Credit supplied by the banking sector is the most important funding source for firms and households in Latin America and the Caribbean. Unfortunately, credit is scarce, costly and volatile. Without deep and stable credit markets, the region will be hard pressed to achieve high and sustainable...

En este trabajo se construye y emplea una nueva base de datos para evaluar la relación que hay entre la propiedad de los bancos y el desempeño de los mismos, y se obtienen distintos indicadores para países en desarrollo y para países industrializados. Se descubre que los bancos propiedad del...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. The paper shows that state-owned banks located in developing countries have fiscal costs because they are characterized by lower returns than...