This paper offers an empirical evaluation of the output contribution of infrastructure. Drawing from a large data set on infrastructure stocks covering 88 countries and spanning the years 1960-2000, and using a panel time-series approach, the paper estimates a long-run aggregate production...

The main goal of this paper is to characterize the determinants of sudden stops caused by domestic vis-a-vis foreign residents. Are the decisions of domestic investors to invest abroad or of foreign investors to cut off funds from the domestic economy governed by the same set of determinants?...

External exposure can be measured by the sensitivity of first and second moments of economic growth to openness and foreign shocks. This paper provides an empirical evaluation of external exposure using panel data methods for a worldwide sample of countries. Controlling for domestic conditions,...

Workers'remittances have become a major source of income for developing countries. However, little is still known about their impact on poverty and inequality. Using a large cross-country panel dataset, the authors find that remittances in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries have...

This paper examines the effects of trade on growth among Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement countries. To accomplish this task, the authors collected a panel data set of 136 countries over 1960-2010, and estimated cross-country growth regressions using an econometric...

Whereas conventional wisdom argues that markets shut down during crises, with sellers struggling to find buyers, we find that markets continue to operate during financial turmoil, even in narrow and volatile emerging economies. Simple event studies indicate that both trading volume and trading...

Why should countries buy expensive catastrophe insurance? Abstracting from risk aversion or hedging motives, this paper shows that catastrophe insurance may have a catalytic role on external finance. Such effect is particularly strong in those middle-income countries that face financial...

The paper documents an intriguing development in the emerging world in the 2000s: a decoupling from the business cycle of advanced countries, combined with the strengthening of the co-movements in the main emerging market assets that predates the synchronized sell-off during the crisis. In...

This semiannual report examines the short and medium-term challenges for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) as the external factors that were instrumental in the region’s recent performance recede. In particular, we address the role of the exchange rate as a counter-cyclical policy tool to...