During the past fifteen years, financial markets in Latin America have experienced a major transformation. This process and its effects on the nature of risks and policy challenges in Latin America were the focus of a May 2007 conference in Mexico City sponsored by the Representative Office for...

This paper uses a rational expectations macroeconomic model in which economic agents formulate the probability about the sustainability of the economic policy - that is, policy credibility - using current and lagged values of government expenditures and lagged values of the inflation rate. The...

During the 1990s, many Latin American countries began to address their problems with recession, inflation, and unemployment through dramatic economic reforms and monetary policy strategies that included exchange rate pegs, monetary aggregate targeting, or inflation targeting. Inflation...

"This paper develops a new and easily implementable necessary and sufficient condition for the exact identification of a Markov-switching structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model. The theorem applies to models with both linear and some nonlinear restrictions on the structural parameters. We...

Many economic applications call for simultaneous equations VAR modeling. We show that the existing importance sampler can be prohibitively inefficient for this type of models. We develop a Gibbs simulator that works for both simultaneous and recursive VAR models with a much broader range of...

The authors consider inflation and government debt dynamics when monetary policy employs a global interest rate rule and private agents forecast using adaptive learning. Because of the zero lower bound on interest rates, active interest rate rules are known to imply the existence of a second,...