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Journal Article
Global banks, local crises: bad news from Argentina
Banking crises have been a recurrent phenomenon in Latin America over the past few decades. Some have argued that the internationalization of the banking sector has ushered in a new era: what used to be systemic risk from the perspective of local banks with undiversified portfolios might no longer be systemic from the standpoint of large international banks. ; Argentina's experience shows that the presence of international banks was not enough to prevent local banking crises and sizable losses to depositors. The "bad news" from Argentina, this article argues, is that depositors in emerging ...
Journal Article
Argentina: the end of convertibility
Journal Article
A hefty price for Argentina's sluggish recovery
Journal Article
Argentina's outlook improves with economic reforms
Journal Article
Implications of the globalization of the banking sector: the Latin American experience
Foreign entry into domestic banking markets remains a contentious issue. Whether privatizing a state bank in Brazil or selling a failed bank in Japan, the proposed sale of a large domestic financial institution, possibly to a foreign acquirer, frequently results in a major controversy. Many Asian countries have yet to experience major foreign penetration of domestic banking markets, while Latin American countries have privatized many of their banks and have encouraged foreign banks to enter their domestic markets. ; Because many Latin American countries opened their markets during the 1990s, ...
Journal Article
Dollarization and monetary sovereignty: the case of Argentina
In January, President Menim of Argentina proposed strengthening his country's commitment to monetary stability by replacing the peso with the U.S. dollar. Dollarization leaves Argentina without a lender of last resort, but the Federal Reserve's current operating procedure combines with existing Argentine arrangements to mitigate this drawback.
Working Paper
Argentina's capital gap puzzle
Argentinas GDP per working age person in 2003 was about the same as it was twenty years earlier and around fifteen percent below trend. By international standards that has been a dismal performance whose ultimate sources are important to uncover to eventually reverse that countrys seemingly secular decline. The purpose of this paper is precisely to take a first step towards that understanding. To that effect, we examine Argentinas recent growth experience, which includes two deep recessions and a recovery, with the lens of a neoclassical growth model that takes total factor productivity as ...
Working Paper
Are labor markets segmented in Argentina? a semiparametric approach
A large part of the theoretical literature on informal economic activities in developing nations is founded on the assumption that labor markets are segmented. In this paper, we evaluate this premise with data from Argentina's permanent household survey for the 1993-1995 time period. We consider various definitions of informality based on the benefits mandated by Argentina's labor laws. We find that average wages are significantly higher in the formal sector than in the informal sector. We proceed to use a matching estimator to correct for the possible endogeneity of employment outcomes. ...
Journal Article
Argentina, Mexico, and currency boards: another case of rules versus discretion
This article discusses currency boards in light of the recent economic experiences of Mexico and Argentina. Carlos Zarazaga argues that currency boards do not solve the important time inconsistency problem pointed out in the rules-versus-discretion literature. Because of this failure, even the quasi-currency board established by law (the so-called convertibility law) did not protect Argentina from one of its most severe financial crises in modern times. ; In addition, there is the normative issue of whether an ironclad rule such as a currency board rule is superior to a noncontingent one. ...