Annotated remarks made at the 50th Anniversary Conference “Fortalecimiento institucional de los bancos centrales y efectividad de la política monetaria”, of the Central Bank of Nicaragua, February 2010. The paper lays out the importance of institutional strenthening (governance) as an...

Familiarity with working in a specific institutional environment compared to its competitors can provide a firm with a competitive advantage, making it invest in specific host countries. We examine whether this notion of institutional competitive advantage drives banks to seek out specific...

Chile’s economic performance since the mid 1990s has been outstanding. Several reasons account for this success. The strong initial position of the economy was a crucial asset. Broad consensus on economic matters helped a lot. This paper argues that the i

Ferguson and Schularick (2006) recently provided a measure of the effect of Empire subjection on borrowing countries’ interest rates. They find this effect to be large and significant, ranging between 80 to 180 basis points. We argue that their methodology is inadequate and that their...

This paper looks at what economic theory and empirical evidence have to offer about the institutional conditions that are most likely to lead to a stable currency. Both theory and evidence suggest that an independent central bank with the explicit mandate to pursue price stability provides an...