Long- and short-run determinants of capital flows to Latin America: a long-run structural GVAR model

This article documents the determinants of capital flows to Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, assessing the relative importance of domestic and international factors through the estimation of a long-run structural Global VAR model of the world economy. The results show that in the long-run international factors prevail on domestic factors as determinants of the equilibrium behaviour of Net Foreign Assets (NFA) and also provide overwhelming evidence that domestic shocks are predominantly responsible for their short-run dynamics. Although all previous studies focus on the US economic influence, one striking result of this article is that the US variables are by no means the main external factors affecting Latin American NFA.     

Relative risk aversion and the transmission of financial crises

We study how investor behavior affects the transmission of financial crises. If investors exhibit decreasing relative risk aversion, then negative wealth shocks increase the risk premium required to hold risky assets. We integrate this into a second generation model of currency crises which allows for contagion through changes in fundamentals. Investor behavior can be a transmission channel of financial crises, as changes in risk premia increase the coverage ratio and makes the defense of a peg less attractive for the policy maker. The feedback effect of the risk premia on the probability of devaluation also makes multiple equilibria more likely. The possible stabilization effects of capital controls and a Tobin tax on the international transmission of financial crises are also studied.     

The contribution of domestic, regional and international factors to Latin America's business cycle

This paper quantifies the relative contribution of domestic, regional and international factors to the fluctuation of domestic output in six key Latin American (LA) countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru. Using quarterly data over the period 1980:1-2003:4, a multi-variate, multi-country time series model was estimated to study the economic interdependence among LA countries and, in addition, between each of them and the three world largest industrial economies: the US, the Euro Area and Japan. Falsifying a common suspicion, it is shown that the proportion of LA countries' domestic output variability explained by industrial countries' factors is modest. By contrast, domestic and regional factors account for the main share of output variability at all simulation horizons. The implications for the choice of the exchange rate regime are also discussed.     

The Stability of Tax Elasticities over the Business Cycle in European Countries

We estimate short‐ and long‐run tax elasticities that capture the relationship between changes in national income and tax revenue. We show that the short‐run tax elasticity changes according to the business cycle. We estimate a two‐state Markov‐switching regression on a novel data set of tax policy reforms in 15 European countries from 1980 to 2013, showing that the elasticities during booms and recessions are statistically (and often economically) different. The elasticities of personal income taxes, corporate income taxes, indirect taxes and social contributions tend to be larger during recessions. Estimates of long‐run elasticities are in line with existing literature.