Schooling Inequality, Crises, and Financial Liberalization in Latin America

Financial Crises after Financial Liberalization: Exceptional Circumstances or Structural Weakness?

Recent studies have conjectured that there may be a link between financial liberalization and financial instability in emerging economies. Most of these studies, however, do not investigate whether emerging economies are becoming structurally more vulnerable to currency and banking crises. In this paper, we argue that emerging economies are systematically becoming more susceptible to both curre...

Inequality in Latin America: Determinants and Consequences

Inequality and Financial Crises : Some Early Findings

We employ the UTIP data set on the evolution of earnings inequality in manufacturing in the global economy to illuminate two questions. First, do regional patterns of similarity in the movement of large macroeconomic aggregates, such as real GDP, imply underlying similarities of industrial structure, so that knowledge of one national economy in a GDP cluster can reasonably be assumed to convey ...

Financial liberalization, prudential supervision, and the onset of banking crises

We examine what is perceived as one of the main culprits in the occurrence of banking crises: financial liberalization. As is typically argued, if liberalization is accompanied by insufficient prudential supervision of the banking sector, it will result in excessive risk taking by financial intermediaries and a subsequent crisis. Having evaluated the empirical validity of this hypothesis, we co...

Historical Roots of Inequality in Latin America

Following Engerman and Sokoloff (1997, 2000, 2002) and Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002), the authors of this chapter argue that the contemporary situation cannot be understood without recognizing that extreme inequality emerged soon after the Europeans began to colonize the Americas half a millennium ago, and has been reflected in the institutions they put in place. Both this initia...