The goal of this paper is to study the link between bank credit (and internal funding) and average firm size in Argentina. Besides the fact that economic growth tends to go hand in hand with larger firm size, the topic is of particular interest because of the severe credit crunch in Argentina in...

This paper investigates the relevance of business saving for private saving and investment around the world by constructing and exploiting a broad international, unbalanced panel of 64 countries over 1990-2012. The paper shows that businesses are the main contributors to private and national...

El presente estudio cuantifica el efecto directo de la dolarización sobre la pobreza en Ecuador. Para ello, en base a información de la Encuesta de Condiciones de Vida para 1999 y 2005/6, se corren microsimulaciones para evaluar cuatro canales directos de transmisión entre dolarización y...

Our study critically surveys financial inclusion in Latin American and Caribbean countries, gauging access to both credit and deposit accounts by poor households. Our review confirms some pieces of conventional wisdom in this area, but challenges some others. Regarding the latter, we claim that...

Quantitative models of sovereign debt predict that countries should default during deep recessions. However, empirical research on sovereign debt has found a surprisingly large share of "good times" defaults (i.e., defaults that happen when GDP is above trend). Existing evidence also indicates...

The 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda recognized the need for policies aimed at maintaining longterm debt sustainability. This paper describes a set of commonly used definitions of debt sustainability and shows that none of them focuses on long-term debt sustainability. It then discusses concept...

This paper surveys recent economic and legal literature on sovereign debt in light of the COVID-19 shock. Most of the core theoretical contributions we review across the two disciplines hinge on immunity, and the sovereign borrower's consequent inability to commit to repay foreign creditors, as...

When allocating their aid budget, development agencies need to decide whether to give outright grants or use concessional loans that blend a grant and credit element. Theory suggests that the degree of concessionality should be negatively correlated with debt sustainability. Several donors use...

This paper develops a simple model with credit rationing and endogenous default risk in which the expectation of a bailout may lead to a financial sector which is too large with respect to the the social optimum. The paper concludes with a short discussion of how this model could be used as a...

This paper uses the rules of engineering as a rhetorical device to discuss why the international financial architecture needs a structured mechanism for dealing with sovereign insolvency. The paper suggests that the most important problem with the status-quo relates to delayed defaults and...