The paper sheds light on the apparent success of dollarization in Ecuador. The experience of Argentina with convertibility is used to anchor the analysis. Two key factors are seen to play the most important role: first, the behavior of the real exchange rate and second, the source of external...

This paper analyzes Raúl Prebisch's less familiar contributions to economic theory, related to the business cycle, and heavily informed by the Argentinean experience. His views of the cycle emphasize the common nature of the cycle in the center and the periphery as one unified phenomenon. While...

Conventional wisdom about the business cycle in Latin America assumes that monetary shocks cause deviations from the optimal path, and that the triggering factor in the cycle is excess credit and liquidity. Further, in this view the origin of the contraction is ultimately related to the excesses...

This paper suggests that heterodox economists should not think of themselves as economists first, and only secondarily as heterodox, and must emphasize methodological issues, in particular the different assumptions (or axioms) implicit in their theories vis-à-vis the mainstream. The paper...

Modern finance has a conceptually unified theoretical core that includes the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), the relationship between risk and return based on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), the Modigliani-Miller theorems (M&M) and the Black-Scholes-Merton approach to option pricing....

The current economic global crisis has thrown fiscal policy onto the center stage. However, the current crisis episode has not produced any change regarding the standing role and function of fiscal policy in developed and developing market economies that has dominated the economics profession...

The paper provides an evaluation of the possibilities for a New Regional Financial Architecture (NRFA) in South America within the context of the "original sin." It is argued that conventional explanations of the "impossible trinity" are limited, and that once the geography of money is properly...

This Conference Paper by Matias Vernengo was presented at the ?Global Conference on Gearing Macroeconomic Policies to Reverse the HIV/AIDS Epidemic?, jointly organized by UNDP?s HIV/AIDS Group and IPC and held in Brasilia, November 2006. It is part of an IPC-supported Research Programme on...

This paper suggests that Clark’s views regarding the Keynesian Revolution illuminate some of the limitations of the Keynesian orthodoxy that developed after the war, bringing more institutional detail and a greater preocupation with dynamic analysis. Clark developed the multiplier in dynamic...

Argentina adopted currency type board arrangements to put an end to monetary instability in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries under very different historical circumstances and contexts with very different results. The first currency board functioned within an international system that...