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Working Paper
Is tighter fiscal policy expansionary under fiscal dominance? Hypercrowding out in Latin America
We test for hypercrowding out as a signal of market concerns over fiscal dominance in five Latin American countries. Hypercrowding out occurs when fiscally dominated governments domestic credit demands are perceived as so intrusive to a nations financial system that a move towards fiscal surplus lowers interest rates and increases growth. We sample five Latin American countries to test for these relationships. Judged by the results of vector error correction models, three nations test clearly positive, suggesting market concern despite their recent efforts towards fiscal balance.
Working Paper
Currency competition and inflation convergence
All agree partial dollarization or currency substitution is a legacy of past inflation and exchange rate instability. Some argue partial dollarization contributes to exchange rate instability. However, if Central Banks respond to dollarization by lowering money growth and maximizing seigniorage revenue, inflation falls and converges on dollar inflation rates. We present a simple model of currency competition with open capital markets to illustrate these points. Empirical tests for Latin America and about twenty other countries suggest that dollarization is both a legacy of past inflation and ...
Working Paper
Capital account liberalization and disinflation in the 1990s
As a way of addressing arguments in the literature (Rodrik, 1998) that the act of capital account liberalization leads to inflation, we present a simple theoretical model in which capital account liberalization raises the absolute value of the elasticity of money demand because agents have broader money holding options than under a closed capital account. The central bank maximizes seigniorage, balancing the benefits of higher inflation against potential losses of foreign currency reserves. The optimum seigniorage-maximizing rate of inflation falls when capital controls are loosened, as a ...
Working Paper
Did NAFTA really cause Mexico's high maquiladora growth?
Although Mexico's maquiladora or in-bond plant system is an important and well-recognized component of Mexico-U.S. trade, the connection between the acceleration in maquiladora growth and NAFTA is less clearly understood. A broad cross-section of maquiladora observers - including journalists, political activists, industry analysts, and professors -- argue that Mexico's maquiladoras have been strongly influenced by NAFTA and have grown rapidly as a result. There are reasons to wonder if these conjectures are correct. I test for the contribution of NAFTA to fluctuations in maquiladora ...
Working Paper
Dollarization and monetary unions: implementation guidelines
Economic Research Working Paper 0105
Working Paper
Financial liberalization, market discipline and bank risk
In the literature on systemic banking crises, two common themes are: (1) Risky lending often follows bank liberalization. (2) Lack of market discipline encourages risky lending. That not all liberalizations are followed by financial crisis and that financial systems without market discipline sometimes operate without incident invites examination of these themes. In a test of six countries, we find that our measure of bank risk increases significantly in the wake of financial liberalizations, but only where depositors fail to discipline banks. Our measures of market discipline and bank risk, ...
Working Paper
Choosing among rival poverty rates : some tests for Latin America
Poverty rates are now widely available, but are they reliable? Wide variations in estimated poverty rates for the same poverty line, year and country reflect an underlying reality: there is no widely accepted procedure for estimating national poverty rates. This paper proposes a simple, ex post procedure for selecting poverty rates that have certain desirable properties. Absolute poverty measures, estimated uniformly across countries, should be correlated with nonmonetary indicators that reflect the consequences of physical deprivation (e.g., malnutrition, birth rates, school attendance). A ...
Working Paper
The openness-inflation puzzle revisited
Dynamic panel estimates show the negative relation between trade openness and inflation found by Romer (1993) but questioned by Terra (1998) became more robust in the 1990s, both among high income OECD and developing countries. Also during the 1990s, openness was associated with less variable inflation and had a stronger disinflation effect in economies with floating exchange rates.
Working Paper
Is foreign-currency indexed debt a commitment technology? Some evidence from Brazil and Mexico
We examine the effects of foreign currency-indexed debt upon inflationary expectations in Brazil and Mexico. Conjecturing that markets will view increasing overhangs of foreign currency-indexed debt as a commitment technology that fiscally punishes devaluation, we test whether increasing such overhangs will attenuate the effect of monetary growth upon inflationary expectations. We find some econometric confirmation of these conjectures in both the Brazilian and Mexican cases. Finding that the results are consistent with the notion that increasing the share of dollar indexed debt may also ...