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Western Hemisphere > Argentina

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 51 items for :

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  • Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy x
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Cover IMF Working Papers
Cross-Border Payments Integration in Latin America and the Caribbean
Dimitris Drakopoulos
,
Yibin Mu
,
Dmitry Vasilyev
, and
Mauricio Villafuerte
Cross-border payment inefficiencies are a significant barrier to trade both within Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and between LAC and other regions. This paper provides a comprehensive review of historical efforts undertaken by various countries within the LAC region to address these challenges. We also explore the potential of recent financial innovations, such as digital currencies and blockchain technology, to enhance cross-border payments. While new technologies do not substitute for prudent and credible macroeconomic policies, leveraging these technologies can help LAC countries reduce transaction costs and times, thus enhancing economic efficiency and fostering deeper regional and global trade relationships.
Keywords:
Cross-Border Payments; Financial Innovation; International Trade; Economic Integration.; LAC payment infrastructure; payment arrangement; cross-border payment inefficiency; integration in Latin America and the Caribbean; cross-border payments integration; Payment systems; Currencies; Financial inclusion; Anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT); Caribbean; Central America; South America; Global; East Asia
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Chile: Selected Issues
International Monetary Fund. Western Hemisphere Dept.
This Selected Issues paper studies renewable energy and attempts to estimate the gross domestic product (GDP) impact and assesses the role of policies in Chile. Chile has a comparative advantage in renewable energy. IMF estimates show that replacing coal power with solar and wind power, as announced by the government, could boost the long-term GDP level by at least 1 percentage point. The analysis indicates that the benefits of having targeted support for the transmission of electricity exceed costs. An additional benefit is the greater economic resilience to abrupt increases in coal and fuel prices that can have large negative impacts on the economy. A key constraint for the renewable energy sector is currently the transmission from where it is produced to where it is used. A cost-benefit analysis shows that state support industries, such as electricity transmission, may have economic benefits that outweigh the costs.
Keywords:
GDP impact; solvency risk; Chilean bank; Fintech firm; cybersecurity risk; Electricity; Cyber risk; Fintech; Energy sector; Financial inclusion; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Financial Stress and Economic Activity: Evidence from a New Worldwide Index
Hites Ahir
,
Mr. Giovanni Dell'Ariccia
,
Davide Furceri
,
Mr. Chris Papageorgiou
, and
Hanbo Qi
This paper uses text analysis to construct a continuous financial stress index (FSI) for 110 countries over each quarter during the period 1967-2018. It relies on a computer algorithm along with human expert oversight and is thus easy to update. The new indicator has a larger country and time coverage and higher frequency than similar measures focusing on advanced economies. And it complements existing binary chronologies in that it can assess the severity of financial crises. We use the indicator to assess the impact of financial stress on the economy using both country- and firm-level data. Our main findings are fivefold: i) consistent with existing literature, we show an economically significant and persistent relationship between financial stress and output; ii) the effect is larger in emerging markets and developing economies and (iii) for higher levels of financial stress; iv) we deal with simultaneous causality by constructing a novel instrument—financial stress originating from other countries—using information from the text analysis, and show that, while there is clear evidence that financial stress harms economic activities, OLS estimates tend to overestimate the magnitude of this effect; (iv) we confirm the presence of an exogenous effect of financial stress through a difference-in-differences exercise and show that effects are larger for firms that are more financially constrained and less profitable.
Keywords:
Financial stress; text analysis; country reports; continuous indicator; country and firm economic activity.; firm economic activity; effect of FSI; financial crises episode; Financial soundness indicators; Banking crises; Reserve requirements; Global financial crisis of 2008-2009; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
The Sovereign-Bank Nexus in Emerging Markets in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Andrea Deghi
,
Mr. Salih Fendoglu
,
Tara Iyer
,
Mr. Hamid R Tabarraei
,
Yizhi Xu
, and
Mustafa Yenice
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the relationship between sovereigns and banks—the so-called sovereign-bank nexus—in emerging market economies to the fore as bank holdings of domestic sovereign debt have surged. This paper examines the empirical relevance of this nexus to assess how it could amplify macro-financial stability risks. The findings show that an increase in sovereign credit risk can adversely affect banks’ balance sheets and credit supply, especially in countries with less-well-capitalized banking systems. Sovereign distress can also impact banks indirectly through the nonfinancial corporate sector by constraining their funding and reducing their capital expenditure. Notably, the effects on banks and corporates are strongly nonlinear in the size of the sovereign distress.
Keywords:
Sovereign-bank nexus; emerging markets; financial stability; sovereign risk; COVID-19; banking sector; corporate investment; outcome variable; Annex I. data description; summary statistics; Emerging and frontier financial markets; Capital adequacy requirements; Commercial banks; Credit default swap; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Understanding and Predicting Systemic Corporate Distress: A Machine-Learning Approach
Ms. Burcu Hacibedel
and
Ritong Qu
In this paper, we study systemic non-financial corporate sector distress using firm-level probabilities of default (PD), covering 55 economies, and spanning the last three decades. Systemic corporate distress is identified by elevated PDs across a large portion of the firms in an economy. A machine-learning based early warning system is constructed to predict the onset of distress in one year’s time. Our results show that credit expansion, monetary policy tightening, overvalued stock prices, and debt-linked balance-sheet weaknesses predict corporate distress. We also find that systemic corporate distress events are associated with contractions in GDP and credit growth in advanced and emerging markets at different degrees and milder than financial crises.
Keywords:
Nonfinancial sector; Probability of default; Early warning systems; Macroprudential policy; balance-sheet weakness; appendix B constructing predictor; distress events; appendix C machine learning model; PD indices; Corporate sector; Banking crises; Credit; Financial statements; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Sovereign Debt Repatriation During Crises
Mr. Serkan Arslanalp
and
Laura Sunder-Plassmann
We use a new, comprehensive data set on the sovereign debt investor base to document three novel empirical facts: (i) sovereign debt is repatriated - that is, shifted from external private to domestic investors - prior to sovereign defaults; (ii) not all crises are equal: evidence for repatriation during banking and currency crises is more limited; and (iii) the nature of defaults matters: external investors do not leave during preemptive debt restructurings. We further show that repatriation appears to be prevalent when defaults happen in large markets with low capital controls. The data set we use is uniquely suited to analyzing investor base dynamics during rare crises due to its large cross-section and time series, covering 180 countries from 1989 to 2020.
Keywords:
Sovereign debt; External debt; Capital flows; Sovereign default; Financial crisis; Banking crisis; Currency crisis; analyzing investor base dynamics; external investor; investor base; investor database; debt maturity; Currency crises; Private debt; Debt default; Global; Caribbean
Cover IMF Working Papers
The Premia on State-Contingent Sovereign Debt Instruments
Ms. Deniz O Igan
,
Mr. Taehoon Kim
, and
Antoine Levy
State-contingent debt instruments such as GDP-linked warrants have garnered attention as a potential tool to help debt-stressed economies smooth repayments over business cycles, yet very few studies of the empirical properties of these instruments exist. This paper develops a general f ramework to estimate the time-varying risk premium of a state-contingent sovereign debt instrument. Our estimation framework applied to GDP-linked warrants issued by Argentina, Greece, and Ukraine reveals three stylized facts: (i) the risk premium in state-contingent instruments is high and persistent; (ii) the risk premium exhibits a pro-cyclical pattern; and (iii) the liquidity premium is higher and more volatile than that for plain-vanilla government bonds issued by the same sovereign. We then present a model in which investors fear ambiguity and that can account for the cyclical properties of the risk premium.
Keywords:
State-contingent debt instruments; GDP-linked warrants; Risk premia; Procyclicality; liquidity premium; GDP-linked warrant; estimation framework; SCDI premium; Sovereign bonds; Securities; Bonds; Liquidity; Debt restructuring; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Uncertainty Premia, Sovereign Default Risk, and State-Contingent Debt
Mr. Francisco Roch
and
Francisco Roldán
We analyze how concerns for model misspecification on the part of international lenders affect the desirability of issuing state-contingent debt instruments in a standard sovereign default model à la Eaton and Gersovitz (1981). We show that for the commonly used threshold state-contingent bond structure (e.g., the GDP-linked bond issued by Argentina in 2005), the model with robustness generates ambiguity premia in bond spreads that can explain most of what the literature has labeled as novelty premium. While the government would be better off with this bond when facing rational expectations lenders, this additional source of premia leads to welfare losses when facing robust lenders. Finally, we characterize the optimal design of the state-contingent bond and show how it varies with the level of robustness. Our findings rationalize the little use of these instruments in practice and shed light on their optimal design.
Keywords:
Sovereign debt; default; state-contingent debt instruments; robust control; ambiguity premia; probability distortion; robust lender; State-contingent debt; ambiguity aversion; debt structure; threshold bond; Bonds; Debt default; Rational expectations; Asset prices
Cover IMF Research Perspectives
IMF Research Perspectives: Spring-Summer 2020
IMF Research Perspectives Spring-Summer 2020
Keywords:
IRB; worker; view IMF research; MARTINEZ PERIA interview
Cover IMF Working Papers
News-based Sentiment Indicators
Chengyu Huang
,
Sean Simpson
,
Daria Ulybina
, and
Agustin Roitman
We construct sentiment indices for 20 countries from 1980 to 2019. Relying on computational text analysis, we capture specific language like “fear”, “risk”, “hedging”, “opinion”, and, “crisis”, as well as “positive” and “negative” sentiments, in news articles from the Financial Times. We assess the performance of our sentiment indices as “news-based” early warning indicators (EWIs) for financial crises. We find that sentiment indices spike and/or trend up ahead of financial crises.
Keywords:
WP; sentiment index; crisis sentiment; seed words; sentiment indices; term cluster; word vector representation; word-vector models; early warning indicators; risk; crisis; sentiment; financial crises; vector representation; Early warning systems; Hedging; Banking crises; Global financial crisis of 2008-2009; Global