Corporate sectors in emerging markets have noticeably increased their reliance on foreign financing, presumably reflecting low global interest rates. The evidence also shows a rebalancing from bank loans towards bonds. To study these developments, this paper develops a dynamic open economy model...

This paper documents how informal employment in Mexico is countercyclical, lags the cycle and is negatively correlated to formal employment. This contributes to explaining why total employment in Mexico displays low cyclicality and variability over the business cycle when compared to Canada, a...

This paper presents an integrated overview of the literature linking institutions, financial development and economic growth. From the large body of research on institutional development, the paper first selects those contributions that make it possible to study the role of institutional...

Latin American countries have long exhibited low levels of saving rates when compared to other countries in relatively similar stages of economic development (e.g., Asian economies). Motivated by this fact, this paper examines the time path of the saving rates between 1970 and 2010 in three...

We develop a methodology to construct real effective exchange rates that incorporate two distinctive elements not accounted for in the traditional measures: i) competition in third markets and ii) adjustments for similarity in export baskets between exporters and their competitors. In addition...

Financial crises in both emerging and developed economies have been characterized by large output drops and spikes in unemployment and interest rates. To account for these stylized facts this paper builds a business cycle model where financial and labor market frictions interact as occasionally...

This paper presents and describes a new dataset of capital control restrictions on both inflows and outflows of 10 categories of assets for 100 countries over the period 1995 to 2013. Building on the data first presented in Schindler (2009) and other datasets based on the analysis of the IMF's...

Fluctuations in commodity prices are an important driver of business cycles in small emerging market economies (EMEs). This paper documents how these fluctuations correlate strongly with the business cycle in EMEs. A commodity sector is then embedded into a multi-country EMEs business cycle...

This paper studies the influence of external financial factors on economic activity in emerging economies (EMEs) motivated by a considerable increase in foreign financing by the corporate sector in EMEs since the early 2000s, mainly in the form of bond issuance. A quarterly external financial...