Argentina suffered a depression in the 1980s that was as severe as the Great Depression experienced in the United States and Germany in the interwar period. Our paper examines this depression from the perspective of growth theory, taking total factor productivity as exogenous. The predictions of...

Key macroeconomic variables such as GDP and investment typically display a V-shaped pattern during major emerging market crises. A notable exception to that pattern is intermediated credit, which follows an L-shaped trajectory instead: it declines at first in lockstep with economic activity, but...

Argentina’s GDP increased 30% between 2002 and 2005, prompting optimistic assessments that the country had finally left behind its secular stagnation. However, this strong performance followed a sharp decline in economic activity and therefore could be the manifestation of a bounce-back effect...

The U.S. economy isn' t recovering from the deep Great Recession of 2008–2009 with the strength predicted by models that incorporate a variety of shocks and frictions in the basic analytical framework of the neoclassical growth model. It has been argued that the counterfactual predictions...

Multilateral trade agreements generally require protracted and complicated negotiations. An obvious alternative is unilateral trade liberalization. However, would this simpler route toward free trade improve a country's welfare? This article, the first in a series of two, addresses this question...

The paper examines Argentina’s economic expansion in the 1990s through the lens of a parsimonious neoclassical growth model. The main finding is that investment remained considerably weaker than what the model would have predicted. The resulting excessive “capital shallowing” could be...

Central banks are always concerned with keeping long-run inflation expectations well anchored at some implicit or explicit low target inflation rate. To that end, they are constantly on the lookout for indicators that can gauge those expectations accurately. One such indicator frequently...

Microeconomic studies keep reporting that the intertemporal substitution in consumption and the Frisch elasticity of aggregate labor supply have significantly lower values than macroeconomic models find consistent with the dynamics of aggregate variables. The paper argues that in the U.S. such...

Fiscal policy is as significant as, and sometimes more important than, monetary policy in determining the price level and, therefore, the dynamics of inflation.