Hidden behind a number of economic crises in the mid- to late 1990s-including Argentina's headline-grabbing monetary and political upheaval-is that fact that Latin American economies have, generally speaking, improved dramatically in recent years. Their success has been due, in large part, to...

In most instances, the dynamic response of monetary and other policies to shocks is infrequent and lumpy. The same holds for the microeconomic response of some of the most important economic variables, such as investment, labor demand, and prices. We show that the standard practice of estimating...

Severe financial crises in developed economies are produced by a combination of three factors: negative surprises that create uncertainty, concentration of macroeconomic risk in leveraged financial institutions and a slow policy response. We propose a policy instrument, Tradable Insurance...