Recent literature has proposed two alternative types of financial frictions, i.e., limited commitment and incomplete markets, to explain the empirical patterns of international capital flows between developed and developing countries in the past two decades. This paper integrates these two...

Latin America's economies have made tremendous improvements in recent years. Following the lost decade of the 1980s, economic growth has resumed. But the fruits of this progress remain to be consolidated. The political consensus supporting reform is fragile, and the economies of the region are...

Financial innovation increases markets' liquidity and provides economic agents with new instruments to better handle risks, but it reduces the efficacy of monetary policy while strengthening the logic and force of the “unholy trinityâ€. Increased liquidity of financial markets and...

This paper presents two views of the European sovereign debt crisis. The first is that countries in the South of the Eurozone were fiscally irresponsible and failed to implement pro-competitive supply side policies. The second view holds that the crisis reflects a deep divide between the...

The prevalent explanation of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) currency crisis of September, 1992 is that myopic speculation prevailed over the “fundamentals.†Our paper explores the reasons why the Italian lira and the U.K. pound were attacked and, subsequently, forced out of the ERM....