In early 2020, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Representative Office for the Americas contacted a group of nine central banks that includes the members of the Consultative Council of the Americas (CCA) except the US Federal Reserve (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia,...

For over five decades, diffusion indexes have been widely used by statistical and economic agencies as an instrument to summarize the dynamics of a group of disaggregated time-series economic data. In this note we revise the methods for constructing diffusion indexes, propose a novel generalized...

While typically socioeconomically disadvantaged, Mexican migrants in the United States tend to have better health outcomes than non-Hispanic Whites. This phenomenon is known as the Hispanic Health Paradox. Using data from Mexico and the United States, we examine several health outcomes for...

In a typical developing country, coverage of the contributory social security system is low. We analyze the aggregate effects of a revenue-neutral fiscal-cum-social policy reform that consists of: 1) the implementation of universal social insurance to replace the system with low coverage; and 2)...

Current data provide macroeconomic information for a large number of countries and for a long period of time (macro panels). This causes that in these panels slope heterogeneity and cross-section dependence (CSD) are a rule rather than the exception, leading to fixed effects slope estimators to...

In order to create an environment of low and stable inflation in Mexico it has been necessary to generate a framework for the conduction of monetary policy focused on price stability along with fiscal discipline. This paper describes some structural achievements to control inflation that have...

The aim of this paper is to make imputations of earnings to observations with missing earnings in the Encuesta Nacional de Ocupaciones y Empleo (ENOE). We present imputations by two methods and also correction of estimations by reweighting observations with reported earnings. Then, we analyze...

We compare the experience of Latin American external debt crises, in particular the one in the 80s, with the current European one. We do so with the aim of shedding some light on the needed adjustment mechanisms. We argue for the need of much larger debt relief in Europe. To address the moral...