This paper shows that the Russian 1998 crisis had a big impact on capital flows to Emerging Market Economies, EMs, especially in Latin America, and that the impact of the Russian shock differs quite markedly across EMs. To illustrate this statement, we compare the polar cases of Chile and...

Moderating spillovers from the advanced economies during the Great Moderation, the global information technology revolution, the influx of skilled immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the gradual buildup of robust and well-regulated financial institutions over decades after the...

We provide a general framework for the analysis of the dynamics of institutional change (e.g., democratization, extension of political rights or repression of different groups), and how these dynamics interact with (anticipated and unanticipated) changes in the distribution of political power...

Inefficiencies in the bureaucratic organization of the state are often viewed as important factors in retarding economic development. Why certain societies choose or end up with such inefficient organizations has received very little attention, however. In this paper, we present a simple theory...

The paper stresses the evolutionary and adaptive experience of Latin American growth between 1950 and 1980, and provides a synthetic view by considering the sources of growth within a simple production framework. Regressions use quinquennial panel data for 18 Latin American countries.They...

This paper surveys much of modern macroeconomics. The focus is on the core macroeconomic issue, of the reasons for macroeconomic fluctuations and sometimes persistent unemployment. To provide continuity and perspective on how promising research leads of the past turned out, the paper starts by...

Brazil has had a long period of high inflation. It peaked around 100 percent per year in 1964, decreased until the first oil shock (1973), but accelerated again afterward, reaching levels above 100 percent on average between 1980 and 1994. This last period coincided with severe balance of...

After the economic reforms that followed the National Revolution of the 1950s, Bolivia seemed positioned for sustained growth. Indeed, it achieved unprecedented growth from 1960 to 1977. The rapid accumulation of debt due to persistent deficits and a fixed exchange rate policy during the 1970s...

This essay offers an economic-history perspective of the long struggle towards macroeconomic stability. The paper is a broad analytical overview of major exogenous shocks and shifts in macroeconomic policy and institutions in Israel since the 1977-1985 great inflation through the global...

We try to explain why Italy's labor productivity stopped growing in the mid-1990s. We find no evidence that this slowdown is due to trade dynamics, Italy's inefficient governmental apparatus, or excessively protective labor regulations. By contrast, the data suggest that Italy's slowdown was...