We investigate the determinants of educational quality in a newly-constructed panel data set that includes output and input measures for a broad number of countries. The results show that family inputs and school resources are closely related to school outcomes, as measured by internationally...

Does national market size matter for industrial structure? This has been suggested by theoretical work on "home market" effects, as in Krugman (1980, 1995). In this paper, I show that what previously was regarded as an assumption of convenience - transport costs only for the differentiated goods...

This paper reviews the foreign debt burden in Central America with special emphasis on Honduras and Nicaragua, which have a large debt overhang. Several indicators suggest that this foreign debt seriously impedes economic growth in both nations. Honduras and Nicaragua, the poorest countries of...

Honduras is in the midst of a substantial reformation of its real-property registration system. The purpose of this paper is to provide the foundation for an analysis of how that reform process might be accelerated and improved. To that end, the paper describes the current condition of the...

We document a striking empirical regularity: Latin American savings rates are as a rule substantially less procyclical than for OECD countries and in some cases are actually countercyclical. We build a non-representative agent inter-temporal macroeconomic model that rationalizes this phenomenon...

Seignorage is the capital gain generated by the creation of reserve money. The literature on seignorage shows that countries with highly developed and deep financial systems generate few resources relative to national income (or government revenue) from seignorage. By contrast, countries with...