As a way of addressing arguments in the literature (Rodrik, 1998) that the act of capital account liberalization leads to inflation, we present a simple theoretical model in which capital account liberalization raises the absolute value of the elasticity of money demand because agents have...

This paper describes a dynamic, general equilibrium model designed to assess whether contractual imperfections in the form of limited enforcement can account for international differences in the organization of production. In the model, limited enforcement constrains some agents to operate...

We test for hypercrowding out as a signal of market concerns over fiscal dominance in five Latin American countries. Hypercrowding out occurs when fiscally dominated governments’ domestic credit demands are perceived as so intrusive to a nation’s financial system that a move towards fiscal...

Economic Research Working Paper 0105

We examine the economic depression that Argentina suffered in the 1980s, as well as the subsequent recovery, from the perspective of growth theory, taking total factor productivity as exogenous. The predictions of the neoclassical growth model conform rather well with the evidence for the "lost...

Argentina’s GDP per working age person in 2003 was about the same as it was twenty years earlier and around fifteen percent below trend. By international standards that has been a dismal performance whose ultimate sources are important to uncover to eventually reverse that country’s...

We describe a dynamic model of financial intermediation in which fundamental characteristics of the economy imply a unique equilibrium path of bank and financial market lending. Yet we also show that economies whose fundamental characteristics have converged may continue to have very different...

Argentina suffered a depression in the 1980s that was as severe as the Great Depression experienced in the United States and Germany in the interwar period. Our paper examines this depression from the perspective of growth theory, taking total factor productivity as exogenous. The predictions of...

A large part of the theoretical literature on informal economic activities in developing nations is founded on the assumption that labor markets are segmented. In this paper, we evaluate this premise with data from Argentina's permanent household survey for the 1993-1995 time period. We consider...