This study focuses on equity, private debt, and asset-backed securities markets in Central America. These markets are generally under-developed throughout the region due to several structural problems, economic and political factors, and weaknesses in regulation and in institutional investor...

This paper examines how emerging bond markets react to macroeconomic announcements. Global bond spreads respond to rating actions and changes in global interest rates rather than domestic data and policy announcements. All announcements affect market volatility. Data and policy announcements...

Despite significant strides in financial development over the past decades, financial dollarization, as reflected in elevated shares of foreign currency deposits and credit in the banking system, remains common in developing economies. We study the impact of financial dollarization,...

This paper examines trends in infrastructure investment and its financing in low-income developing countries (LIDCs). Following an acceleration of public investment over the last 15 years, the stock of infrastructure assets increased in LIDCs, even though large gaps remain compared to emerging...

We present estimates of welfare by country for 2007 and 2014 using the methodology of Jones and Klenow (2016) which incorporates consumption, leisure, mortality and in equality, and we extend the methodology to include environmental externalities. During the period of the global financial crisis...

While the world is focused on addressing the near-term ramifications of the COVID-19 shock, we turn attention to another important aspect of the pandemic: its fallout on medium-term potential output through scarring. Taking Australia and New Zealand as examples, we show that the pandemic will...

This paper reviews the economics of trade policy in financial services, highlighting differences between trade across borders and through commercial presence. Trade liberalization could complement other financial reforms by enhancing the efficiency, quality, and variety of financial services and...

This paper presents an alternative method for calculating debt targets using the debt intolerance literature of Reinhart, Rogoff, and Savastano (2003) and Reinhart and Rogoff (2009). The methodology presented improves on the previous papers by using a dynamic panel approach, correcting for...