The paper presents a new database on sovereign debt in the Americas, describing the sources used and briefly discussing several methodological issues. The paper also highlights major trends in level and composition of public debt in the Americas, discussing debt dollarization in detail

The paper presents a new database on sovereign debt in the Americas, describing the sources used and briefly discussing several methodological issues. The paper also highlights major trends in level and composition of public debt in the Americas, discussing debt dollarization in detail.

Levy Yeyati and Sturzenegger (2001, 2003, 2005) proposed an exchange rate regime classification based on cluster analysis to group countries according to the relative volatility of exchange rates and reserves, thereby shifting the focus from a de jure to de facto approach in the empirical...

In recent years the term quot;fear of floatingquot; has been used to describe exchange rate regimes that, while officially flexible, in practice intervene heavily to avoid sudden or large depreciations. However, the data reveals that in most cases (and increasingly so in the 2000s) intervention...

This paper studies the impact of exchange rate regimes on inflation, nominal money growth, real interest rates, and growth performance. We find that, for non-industrial economies, "long" pegs (defined as those lasting for five or more consecutive years) are associated with lower inflation than...

We study the relationship between exchange rate regimes and economic growth for a sample of 154 countries over the post-Bretton Woods period (1974-1999), using a new de facto classification of regimes based on the actual behavior of the relevant macroeconomic variables. In contrast with previous...

This paper studies the impact of exchange rate regimes on inflation, nominal money growth, real interes rates, and GDP growth. We find that, for nonindustrial economies, long pegs (lasting five or more years) are associated with lower inflation than floats, but at the cost of slower growth. A...

The literature has identified three main approaches to account for the way exchange rate regimes are chosen: i) the optimal currency area theory; ii) the financial view, which highlights the consequences of international financial integration; and iii) the political view, which stresses the use...

Most of the empirical literature on the relative merits of alternative exchange rate regimes uses the IMF 'de jure' classification based on the regime that governments claim to have, abstracting from the fact that many countries that in theory follow flexible regimes intervene in the exchange...

Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address...