This paper aims at identifying the underlying reasons for substantial accumulation of foreign reserves, a strategy currently followed by a large number of countries. To this end, it first studies international liquidity conditions and individual country demand for reserves. It then analyses...

This paper presents and evaluates the hypothesis that emerging countries specialized in commodity production are prone to experience non orthogonal commercial and financial shocks. Specifically, we investigate a set of global macroeconomic variables that, in principle, could simultaneously...

The goal of this paper is to provide up-to-date worldwide evidence on the short-term relationship between credit changes and output changes. Standard correlation methods, state of-the-art panel Granger causality tests, and panel regressions were applied on a maximum sample of 144 countries over...

Up to the financial slump of the second quarter of 2008 commodity prices grew fast for several consecutive years in a highly volatile context. Recent commodity fluctuations have raised both policy concerns and a prolific academic debate. This paper offers a coherent theoretical and empirical...

The aim of this paper is to identify the relationship between macroeconomic shocks and financial vulnerability in the Argentine case for the period 1977-2004, by using VEC models. The results show that falls in the deposit-currency ratio (indicator of crisis or financial vulnerability) would be...

A traditional way of thinking about the exchange rate (XR) regime and capital account openness has been framed in terms of the "impossible trinity" or "trilemma", in which policymakers can only have 2 of 3 possible outcomes: open capital markets, monetary independence and pegged XRs. This paper...

The level of bankarization (access to and use of banking services) is relatively low in Argentina both in historical terms and compared with similarly developed countries. This is shown by indicators both of access to and use of banking services. This paper analyzes a unique database containing...

Until the eruption of the 2007-2008 international crisis, the decade was characterized by a high growth of credit –especially credit lines for consumption– and of GDP in a large part of the developed and developing worlds. By the end of the period, the process coincided with increasing...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium(DSGE) model for a small open economy (SOE) that can be calibrated to simulate the macro dynamics of a semi-industrialized developing country like Argentina. We consider a multilateral non-commodity trade environment, with the U.S.A....

The profit-maximizing and oligopoly bank model developed by Bresnahan and Lau allows determining the degree of market power held by an average bank. The equilibrium price equation includes a mark up, which is not used in the case of perfect competition but which is partially used in the case of...