This paper shows that budget deficits account for a relatively small fraction of debt growth and that stock-flow reconciliation, which is often considered a residual entity, is one of the key determinants of debt dynamics. After having explained the importance of the stock-flow reconciliation,...

This paper uses a difference-in-difference methodology similar to the one originally proposed by Rajan and Zingales (1998) to test whether defaulting hurts the more export-oriented industries. Strong support for this hypothesis was found, but contrary to the findings of previous studies, our...

This paper shows that a large fraction of the variability of emerging market bond spreads is explained by the evolution of global factors such as risk appetite (as reflected in the spread of high yield corporate bonds in developed markets), global liquidity (measured by the international...

Approximately 14 percent of births are unregistered in Latin America according to estimates by UNICEF (2001). Children who lack an official birth certificate can be denied access to social services, including enrolling in school and accessing health services. This paper examines the...

This paper studies the link between the political and institutional context and privatization sales prices. The latter serves as a measure for assessing the relative performance of the privatization goals. Whereas this link has been studied theoretically, there are very few, if any, empirical...

Critics of globalization claim that foreign ownership of privatized firms is linked to negative post-privatization labor outcomes, such as more firing and less hiring. This paper uses new firm-level data for a cross section of countries to test this idea and provides evidence that foreign...

Drawing on previously unused objective institutional data, we provide evidence for the causal link between rent-seeking behavior and democracy in Uruguay, a country where both rent-seeking behavior and political shifts have varied widely in the last 80 years, but where ethnolinguistic...

The aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the link between foreign aid and income inequality for the period 1973-2002. Since simple cross-country regressions cannot be taken as true time series findings, we also focus on dynamic panel data techniques, which allow accounting for...

This paper discusses coordination failures, their relevance to developing countries, and the circumstances under which they occur, arguing that that clusters can be seen as agglomerations of firms and organizations in related economic activities among which coordination failures are likely to...

Substantial attention has been paid in recent years to the risk of maturity mismatch in emerging markets. Although this risk is microeconomic in nature, the evidence advanced thus far has taken the form of macro correlations. This paper empirically evaluates this mechanism at the micro level by...