This paper investigates the effects of political (mis)alignment on public service delivery when mandates are shared between state and local governments. We analyze sewage treatment policies in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Relying on difference-in-differences estimations, we establish a...

Using micro data on expenditure and income for 17 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries, this paper presents stylized facts on saving behavior by age, education, income and place of residence. Counterfactual saving rates are computed by imposing the saving behavior, the population...

This paper evaluates from a welfare perspective three policy alternatives for dealing with Dutch disease problems originating from cyclical movements in commodity prices: fiscal rules for government expenditures, capital controls, and taxes on domestic lending. A DSGE model of a small open...

This paper explores how affiliates of multinational corporations save liquidity when facing a transitory cash-flow shock. For this a panel is first built of non-publicly traded copper mines in South America between 2001 and 2012, most of them set up as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). This...

In recent years, an increasing number of countries have began anchoring their fiscal policy frameworks in terms of rules that target the cyclically adjusted or structural (as opposed to actual) balance in an effort to overcome problems of procyclicality and fiscal volatility. The logic for doing...

Using panel co-integration techniques and a comprehensive dataset covering the period 1980-2013, this paper finds a positive and significant correlation between national saving and domestic investment rates in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The estimated correlation is approximately 0.39;...

In this paper, we bring to light the experiences resulting from the significant depreciation of the Uruguayan real exchange rate between 2002 and 2003, followed by an equally considerable appreciation between 2004 and 2010. We explore the link between these fluctuations and the incidence of...

This paper examines whether elections, which are generally held on fixed dates, and banking crises explain the timing of tax reforms and the allocation of the additional tax burden. Using an original fine-grained dataset of tax reforms, the paper finds support for the role of these two sources...

This study estimates Climate Adjusted Total Factor Productivity (CATFP) for agriculture in Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries, while also providing comparisons with several regions of the world. Climatic variability is introduced in Stochastic Production Frontier (SPF) models by...