Credit has been found to be a catalyst for economic growth, as it spurs investment, enhances productivity, allows costs to be spread out over time, improves resource allocation, and enables investors to cope better with macroeconomic volatility. Most studies focus on the relationship between...

During the past fifteen years, financial markets in Latin America have experienced a major transformation. This process and its effects on the nature of risks and policy challenges in Latin America were the focus of a May 2007 conference in Mexico City sponsored by the Representative Office for...

During the past fifteen years, financial markets in Latin America have experienced a major transformation. This process and its effects on the nature of risks and policy challenges in Latin America were the focus of a May 2007 conference in Mexico City sponsored by the Representative Office for...

The depth of and access to financial services provided by banks throughout Latin America are extremely low in spite of its recognized importance for economic activity, employment and poverty alleviation. Low financial depth and access hurts the poor the most and is due to a variety of obstacles...

I investigate the aggregate consequences of canonical financial frictions in the supply of credit to firms: private information and limited enforcement. I propose a general equilibrium model in which entrepreneurs finance their firm through a long-term contract with a financial intermediary. The...

Credit has been found to be a catalyst for economic growth, as it spurs investment, enhances productivity, allows costs to be spread out over time, improves resource allocation, and enables investors to cope better with macroeconomic volatility. Most studies focus on the relationship between...

Zervos documents the precise costs of debt and equity issuance, both domestically and internationally, for firms in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Costs include investment banking and legal fees, regulatory and exchange listing costs, rating agency fees, and expenditures for marketing and...

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how the boosting approach can be used to quantify the corporate governance risk in the case of Latin American markets. We compare our results using Adaboost with logistic regression, bagging, and random forests. We conduct tenfold cross-validation...

There is growing support for taxes on short-term capital inflows in emerging markets, such as the encaje adopted by Chile from 1991-98. Previous empirical assessments of the encaje conclude that it may have generated some small economic benefits, such as shifting the composition of capital...