Our study critically surveys financial inclusion in Latin American and Caribbean countries, gauging access to both credit and deposit accounts by poor households. Our review confirms some pieces of conventional wisdom in this area, but challenges some others. Regarding the latter, we claim that...

This work discusses the determinants of the access to credit for a sample of about 140 Argentine small and medium firms, based on a unique database gathered by the Union Industrial Argentina in 1999. Among other findings, the evidence shows that the acceptance of overdraft lines at high interest...

Dividend policy is central to the performance and valuation of listed companies, but the issue still remains scarcely investigated in emerging countries. The purpose of this paper is to study, for the first time, the determinants of the dividend policy of listed companies in Argentina over the...

This paper assesses the impact of the Liquidity Program for Growth Sustainability (LPGS) on Latin America and the Caribbean, instrumented by the IDB to confront the regional spillovers of the subprime crisis. This emergency liquidity line was set up to boost productive loans of commercial banks,...

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we put together, for the first time, quantitative measures on the quality of the corporate governance and the ownership structure for 65 non-financial listed companies in Argentina with information for 2003-2004. A wide array of official and private...

The main purpose of our work is to construct portfolio loss distributions of small and large loans in Argentina using bootstrapping techniques. Annual data (covering the 1999-2005 period) from the Debtors Register of the Central Bank of Argentina over 580.000 records have been used. The work has...

'Investor Protection and Corporate Governance' analyzes the impact of corporate governance on firm performance and valuation. Using unique datasets gathered at the firm-level--the first such data in the region--and results from a homogeneous corporate governance questionnaire, the book examines...

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...

The goal of this paper is to study the link between bank credit (and internal funding) and average firm size in Argentina. Besides the fact that economic growth tends to go hand in hand with larger firm size, the topic is of particular interest because of the severe credit crunch in Argentina in...