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Journal Article
Mexico's financial vulnerability: then and now
Financial turmoil dots Mexico?s recent economic history. Between 1975 and 1995, the nation experienced recurrent currency, debt and banking crises with devastating effects on real economic activity. ; In Mexico, election years often heighten the risk of financial instability. Debt defaults or massive devaluations?or both?have accompanied three of the past five presidential elections. Given that history, it?s not surprising that questions about Mexico?s financial vulnerability have arisen with the approach of July?s presidential election. ; While the concerns may be understandable, Mexico has ...
Journal Article
Mexico's export woes not all China-induced
Working Paper
A New Perspective on the Finance-Development Nexus
The existing literature on financial development focuses mostly on the causal impact of the quantity of financial intermediation on economic development. This paper, instead, focuses on the role of the financial sector in creating securities that cater to the needs of heterogeneous investors. To that end, we describe a dynamic extension of Allen and Gale (1989)?s optimal security design model in which producers can tranche the stochastic cash flows they generate at a cost. Lower tranching costs in that environment lead to capital deepening and raise aggregate output. The implications of lower ...
Working Paper
Financial Engineering and Economic Development
The vast literature on financial development focuses mostly on the causal impact of the quantity of financial intermediation on economic development and productivity. This paper, instead, focuses on the role of the financial sector in creating securities that cater to the needs of heterogeneous investors. We describe a dynamic extension of Allen and Gale (1989)?s optimal security design model in which producers can tranche the stochastic cash flows they generate at a cost. Lowering security creation costs in that environment leads to more financial investment, but it has ambiguous effects on ...
Journal Article
Financial crises: still a mystery
Working Paper
Firm specific human capital vs. job matching: a new test
We use a unique data set on employee turnover by industry in Arizona to test competing theories of turnover. We find that industries with lower establishment survival rates have more employee turnover, even after controlling for differences in the distribution of employee tenure. This result is consistent with a model of turnover where employees choose how much firm specific human capital to accumulate, but it is inconsistent with job matching models.
Journal Article
Why is French unemployment so high?
Working Paper
Why do financial systems differ? History matters
We describe a dynamic model of financial intermediation in which fundamental characteristics of the economy imply a unique equilibrium path of bank and financial market lending. Yet we also show that economies whose fundamental characteristics have converged may continue to have very different financial structures. Because setting up financial markets is costly in our model, economies that emphasize financial market lending are more likely to continue doing so in the future, all else equal.
Journal Article
Labor markets in turbulent times: some evidence from Mexico
Financial shocks increase the need to shift workers among employers, industries and occupations. These disruptions, in turn, can have adverse impacts on productivity.
Journal Article
How much will the global financial storm hurt Mexico?
The credibility earned by prudent policymaking over the past decade should help Mexico weather the current financial storm without devastating effects on real economic activity.