This paper focuses on some of the macroeconomic risks that lie ahead for Latin America. The discussion is informed by my work on crises and capital flows and their macroeconomic consequences. The trends and initial conditions that allowed the region to weather the global economic storm of...

In this note, we attempt to place the question of how we got to the global financial crisis that began as the US Subprime debacle in the summer of 2007 in the context of an international and historical comparative setting. It is of some poignancy that the “we” here refers to the wealthiest...

Control charts are extensively used in many real world applications. Since process parameters are rarely known common practice is to estimate them. Then, the control limits are modified and become actually random variables. In this paper, we deal with the univariate control charts for dispersion...

The stuttering generalized Waring distribution is introduced and shown to arise through two urn genesis schemes. Its probability generating function and moments are derived and some potential applications are discussed

The standard pattern: capital flows into the new “hot” nation, but then stop or reverses forcing painful adjustment. This column presents research based on such episodes from 181 nations during 1980-2007 and for a subset of 66 nations for the 1960-2007 period. If the pattern of the past few...

We highlight in this note how an application of a similar estimation approach as ours to Colombian data for a more recent period following financial and capital account liberalization may find that the money supply is "endogenous" (i.e. demand-determined as long as the exchange rate is heavily...

Financial crises are historically associated with the “4 deadly D’s”: Sharp economic downturns follow banking crises; with government revenues dragged down, fiscal deficits worsen; deficits lead to debt; as debt piles up rating downgrades follow. For the most fortunate countries, the...

This note deals with finding the solution of a functional equation, where the function involved has the additional property of being a probability generating function. It turns out that the unique solution of this particular functional equation is the probability generating function of the...

This paper has addressed the following questions: Do sovereign credit ratings systematically help predict currency and banking crises? If not, why not? What needs to change? What is the behavior of credit ratings following the crises? Are there important differences in the behavior of credit...

This note is concerned with the derivation of the distribution of a random variable X in terms of the distribution of Y given X, where X, Y are discrete random variables with finite support