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Working Paper
Crisis, contagion, and country funds: effects on East Asia and Latin America
Spillovers effects, from one country or region to other countries and regions, have attracted renewed attention in the aftermath of the Mexican crisis of December 1994. This paper uses data on closed-end country funds to study how a negative shock in Mexican equities is transmitted to Asia and Latin America, and to particular countries within each region. Country funds allow us to study the transmission to other fund net asset values (NAVs) and prices, which are traded in local stock markets in New York, respectively. The evidence indicates that shocks such as the Mexican crisis produce ...
Journal Article
Argentina: the end of convertibility
Journal Article
Argentina's currency crisis: lessons for Asia
This Economic Letter is based on a presentation Mark Spiegel prepared for a panel on "Optimal Currency Arrangements for Emerging Market Economies: The Experience of Latin America and Asia" organized by the Latin American and Asian Economics and Business Association on July 15, 2002, in Tokyo, Japan
Journal Article
Mexico's financial crisis affected other Latin countries
Conference Paper
A new approach to measuring financial contagion
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 ...
Working Paper
Argentina's lost decade
Argentina suffered a depression in the 1980s that was as severe as the Great Depression experienced in the United States and Germany in the interwar period. Our paper examines this depression from the perspective of growth theory, taking total factor productivity as exogenous. The predictions of the growth model conform rather well with the observations during the lost decade years. ; Economic Research Working Paper 0107
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. ...
Working Paper
Banking and finance in Argentina in the period 1900-35
From 1900 to 1935, Argentina evolved from an economy highly dependent on external, primarily British, finance to one more nearly self-sufficient. We examine the failure of domestic finance to adequately fill the void left by the decline of London and the breakdown of the world financial system in the interwar period, when neither the Buenos Aires Bolsa nor the private domestic banks developed rapidly enough to fully replace British investors as efficient channels for financing private investment. One consequence is that Argentine investable funds were increasingly concentrated in a single ...