This article aims to reflect on recent transformations happened in development financial institutions (DFI) in Latin America. To this end, we selected DFI that act in the major economies in Latin America, except the Brazil. The work give preference to public institutions that had activities in...

In the years preceding the international debt crisis of the 1980s, international banks displayed a growing enthusiasm for lending to Mexico and other developing countries. During this period, Mexico's development and commercial banks got heavily involved in intermediating foreign finance with...

This paper explores why Spanish banks internationalise and why Latin America has been the main region for the international expansion of BBVA and Santander. It shows that prior to 1986 Spanish banks had a limited presence abroad, and analyses the main drivers of this initial expansion...

In the wake of the debates on Digitalized Finance, and updating some of its main findings regarding the prognoses of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this paper presents an overview of recent developments, as well as the main tendencies of the process of digitalization of the Brazilian capital...

This paper analyzes the determinants of local institutions and distribution of political power within a constant 'macro-institutional' setting. We show that characteristics of Brazilian municipalities related to institutional quality and distribution of political power are partly inherited from...

The paper deals with changes in the regulation and supervision of the Latin American financial sector in the aftermath of the ‘Tequila Crisis’ of 1994–95. While it finds that both have improved, regulation and supervision cannot resolve all problems; good macroeconomic policy and...

Social capital and value creation are concepts that have been associated in financial literature for a long time and still remain controversial. Social capital refers to a firm's attributes, such as trust, civic attitudes, and relationship networks that enable greater economic development. It is...

I study the diffusion process of permanent disinflationary shocks in the Mexican economy using disaggregated price data for 283 goods across 46 cities in the period 1995-2012. I first show that the distribution of shocks shows considerable heterogeneity, with more than 80% of all cases having...

Three decades ago, and with very few precedents, Spain's two principal banking corporations began an intense process of expansion throughout Latin America. Not only did they compete with one other in this new market, but they also faced competition from domestic Latin American banks and other...

The state of anomie that has characterised and still characterises most Latin American countries, resulting from the fragmentation of the social fabric, has encouraged the rise of successful personalist leaderships in the '90s. This paper aims at investigating how neopopulism developed in Latin...