We present a model of endogenous institutional change that rationalizes reforms that have taken place in the context of economic crisis and drastic political change. Most of these reforms have been initiated by powerholders, even though they have ended worse-off relative to the status quo. The...

We find that in 1995 and 1997 the crisis did not spread in a purely random way. The cross-country variation in the severity of the crisis was largely determined by three fundamentals: the strength of the banking system, the real appreciation, and the international liquidity of the country. We...

The paper discusses the reestablishment of property rights within the firm in Section II. Then it analyzes the elimination of soft budget constraints and bankruptcy reform. Section IV and V discuss restructuring and regulation issues as well as auction design.

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 intertemporal macroeconomic model that rationalizes this phenomenon...