The role of regional integration agreements as a determinant of the location of FDI has become an increasingly relevant issue for emerging economies. In Latin America, the largest effects are likely to be associated with the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). In this regard, there are a...

This paper studies the impact of regional integration agreements (RIAs) on the location of foreign direct investment (FDI), using data on bilateral outward FDI stocks from the OECD International Direct Investment Statistics. The dataset covers FDI from 20 source countries, all of them from the...

To the extent that they exert a critical influence on the macroeconomic environment, monetary and exchange rate policies (MERP) are relevant for development. However, the analytical economic literature often sees nominal variables as being irrelevant for the real economy, while the multiplicity...

Recent empirical research on emerging markets debt, currency crises and fiscal sustainability has placed a significant focus on the role of currency mismatches with the emphasis placed on the currency composition of explicit government liabilities . The key insight of this paper is that these...

In this paper, I revisit the moral hazard arguments in order to discuss alternative approaches to the role of the IFIs. In particular, I distinguish between lender, borrower and government moral hazard, according to how the costs and benefits of IFI intervention are distributed among the...

This paper presents a framework to analyze financial globalization. It argues that financial globalization needs to take into account the relation between money (particularly in its role as store of value), asset and factor price flexibility, and contractual and regulatory institutions....

Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address...

This paper studies how institutional factors and systemic risks (driven by macroeconomic conditions) prevalent in emerging economies may impact market discipline among banks (traditionally understood as market responses to bank fundamentals). First, we discuss how certain institutional features...