Unemployment is a pressing problem in many countries in Latin America. Financial crises and increased globalization increase job turnover and therefore the risk of unemployment. To protect workers, Chile implemented an innovative unemployment insurance (UI) system. UI protects workers but...

The relevance of transport costs has increased as liberalization continues to reduce artificial barriers to trade. Countries need to adopt policies to `get closer` to global markets. Can improvements in infrastructure and regulation reduce transport costs? Is it worthwhile to implement policies...

In this paper we provide an overview of the situation of the Internet in Latin America and argue that, although latecomers, Latin American countries could in principle catch up at a faster pace and a lower cost. But that will depend on the environment for innovation in the countries; in that...

In recent years, Latin American banking sectors have experienced an accelerated process of concentration and foreign penetration that has prompted diverse views regarding its implications for the competitive behavior of banks and for the financial stability of the system as a whole. Exploiting a...

This paper studies the relationship between creditor protection and credit response to macroeconomic shocks. Using a dataset on legal determinants of finance in a panel of data of aggregate credit growth for a sample of 79 countries during the period 1990-2004, it shows that credit is more...

We develop a model that shows that inefficient legal protections, disproportionately increase financial restrictions for creditors that have less wealth. Due to fixed monitoring costs in equilibrium banks will not monitor small firms and therefore these firms will adopt risky technologies that...

This paper checks whether state-ownership of banks is correlated with ending behavior over the business cycle and finds that their lending is less responsive to macroeconomic shocks than the lending of private banks. The paper tests whether this is due to the presence of quot;lazyquot; public...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. After having discussed whether there is a theoretical justification for the presence of state-owned banks, the paper focuses on their...