The study of bank interest rate spreads is central to our understanding of the process of financial intermediation. Data limitations generally restrict empirical analyses to interest rate spreads that are constructed from bank income statements and balance sheets. In this paper we make use of a...

This essay examines the first 50 years of the National Mortgage Bank of Chile (Caja de Crédito Hipotecario) following its creation in 1855. During the second half of the nineteenth century the Mortgage Bank’s credit operations spurred the rapid expansion of irrigation in Chile’s Central...

The literature on safety nets has become technically more precise by drawing on advances in contract theory and optimal governance structure. This paper begins with a treatment of some aspects of the theory. The author's approach draws more on institutional economics, and more precisely on the...

This paper resolves a long-standing obstacle in the development and use of the dependent economy model with investment. This obstacle derives from the fact that models of the dependent economy with investment have been criticized for arbitrarily assuming that capital is either tradable or...

This paper considers the role of the relative price of non-traded goods and the current account in the adjustment of a small open economy to the receipt of an international transfer. The paper shows that the economy's macroeconomic adjustment to the transfer depends upon the relative capital...