Can limited government be a driving force of economic development? This idea goes back to Montesquieu, and is closely related to recent research in institutional economics. Measuring limited government with the Henisz political constraints index, and economic development with income per capita,...

The paper analyzes the challenges for the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) to be an effective lender of last resort (LOLR) as part of a modern banking crisis resolution framework. The main results from the theoretical model of the ECCB's institutional arrangement are that the majority of...

The paper provides a theoretical and cross-country empirical analysis of the determinants of financial deepening, and finds that higher credit-to-GDP ratios are associated with stronger creditor rights and lower inflation, and that the marginal effect of improvements in creditor rights...

We examine a large panel of more than 100 banks from Argentina to study the effects of bank consolidation on performance between December 1995 and December 2000, a period of heavy bank consolidation and relative calm. Overall, we find a positive and significant effect of bank consolidation on...

This paper develops a semiotic-inferential model of verbal communication for incomplete information games: a language is seen as a set of conventional signs that point to types, and the credibility of a message depends on the strategic context. Formally, there is an encoding-decoding step where...

We build a panel with quarterly data from Latin American and OECD countries over the 1980-2005 period. Annual data strongly underestimate the effect of political budget cycles (PBCs) when a pre-electoral fiscal expansion is followed by a post-electoral contraction, since the effects cancel out...

Primero usamos casos empíricos concretos para motivar la discusión de los ciclos electorales en política fiscal. Luego presentamos una revisión teórica y econométrica de la literatura. Teóricamente, los ciclos se pueden interpretar en términos de un problema de inconsistencia temporal...

The links between subnational political budget cycles (PBCs) and the national government in federal countries have seldom been studied. We study the behavior of the budget balance, public expenditures, and revenues in Argentine provinces during the 1985–2001 period. We find that in election...

In Latin America there is ample evidence of exchange rate depreciations after elections. Hence, we turn to the behavior of international reserves over the 1980–2005 period to investigate if exchange rates are temporarily stabilized before elections. Using annual, quarterly, and monthly data to...