Studying the modern economic histories of the ten largest countries in South America and Mexico teaches us the lack of fiscal discipline has been at the root of most of the region's macroeconomic instability. The lack of fiscal discipline, however, takes various forms not measured in the primary...

Does government size increase to compensate for the volatility that arises from openness? We evaluate this compensation hypothesis by focusing on Latin America, whose economic growth in the 2000s has been often attributed to the commodity boom. Panel data regressions show that during the...

This article examines economic development from 1996 to 2015 for 192 countries and specifically Latin America. Evidence shows that each 0.1-point increase in institutions impacts a 3.9% improvement in Latin American per capita output versus a 2.6% effect on world development. This new evidence...

A considerable debate has taken place among economists and policymakers over the merits of the Import-Substitution Industrialization (ISI) as a strategy for economic development in modern South America. We study quantitatively the effect of the ISI policy and their impact on long-run growth. To...

This article analyzes sovereign debt defaults in four Latin American countries — Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico — for the period 1870-2012. The impact of sovereign defaults on real GDP growth is generally short-lived, while the impact in terms of output losses is deep and lasts long....

Given their powerful position in presidential cabinets, technocrats are an important transmission mechanism for explaining economic policy choices, but have received less attention compared to other well-established channels such as elections or democratic tenure. I incorporate the role of...

Globalization scholars have long-debated to what extent economic integration, and specifically, mobile private capital constrains national policymaking. With Western capital reeling from the 2008 financial crisis, state-owned capital made inroads globally. China, as the world's largest saver,...

Political economy theory expects that changes in macroeconomic governance are often catalyzed by institutional factors, such as partisanship, elections, or IMF conditionality. I challenge and contextualize this view by incorporating the role of technocratic advisors into a domestic policymaking...

In this article, we show the evolution of inequality for the largest economies of the Latin American region in the 21st century, with separate consideration of income and wealth. We analyse the drivers of the changes in inequality and possible underlying causes, including the role of the new...

Utilizing a unique data set based on companies' annual reports and local leading financial publications; data from privatization of state-controlled enterprises; world merger and acquisitions (M&As) and financial data from the Mexican (BMV) and New York (NYSE) stock exchanges, this paper studies...