Abstract Traditionally, the United States has been the major trading and financial partner of Latin America. However, since 2000 it has lost its hegemony in the region due to China’s growing influence. China’s emergence as a source of capital for Latin America has increasingly integrated both financial markets, potentially increasing the risk of volatility spillovers. Using a heterogeneous ARDL model, we study volatility transmission from the USA and China to six main Latin American stock markets over short-run and long-run horizons. Although the US volatility spillover has decreased over time, it is still more relevant than that of China. This finding remains after controlling for commodity price volatility. The identification of these dynamic patterns in the US and Chinese volatility spillovers can help investors to make more informed portfolio management decisions and can help policymakers in monitoring financial stability in the region.

This data article introduces a comprehensive real-time dataset (RTD) of Peru's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates from 1994 to 2025. The dataset was constructed by systematically collecting and processing three decades of the Peruvian Central Reserve Bank (BCRP) Weekly Reports and compiled into over 1000 structured data files organized across three processing tiers (raw, input, and output). For the 1994-2012 period, data were digitized from archival hardcover volumes using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with rigorous manual verification. Post-2013 data were integrated via automated web-scraping and PDF extraction pipelines from digital publications. The resulting dataset includes monthly, quarterly, and annual growth rates for aggregate GDP and eight economic sectors, organized in two complementary formats: vintage (rows indexed by sector and publication month; columns correspond to target periods) and release (rows correspond to target periods; columns index the h th published estimate for that period, given each economic sector). The collection includes variants for base-year adjustments and identifies major benchmark revisions. All data are provided in CSV format with comprehensive documentation. An open-source Python pipeline enables full reproducibility and future updates. This RTD serves as an important resource for researching GDP revision patterns, real-time forecasting accuracy, nowcasting model evaluation, and cross-country comparisons of statistical practices in emerging economies.

How have the financial linkages among the US, China, and emerging markets changed since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)? Using intraday data from 2013 to 2023, we study the financial connectedness of stock markets in the US, China, and the regions with BRI countries. Our time-varying measures of connectedness indicate that the BRI has not significantly changed the financial relationships between China and BRI countries nor has it diminished the financial connections between these countries and the US. Our net directional connectedness analysis finds that the Middle East and Africa region, and the Central Asia and Europe region are the most susceptible to shocks from the US and China. Policymakers and investors should be concerned about periods and regions susceptible to American and Chinese financial shocks, as these can increase network connectivity, thereby heightening financial instability and reducing the benefits of portfolio diversification.

This paper examines how private bank regulation and liquidity provided by the Federal Reserve in the US are related to deviations from the covered interest parity (CIP). We find evidence that the effects of bank liquidity on CIP deviations partially offset those resulting from regulatory changes in a sample of 11 OECD countries over the 2001-2019 period. This finding supports the conjecture that changes in private banks’ liquidity and regulation can significantly affect the cross-currency basis. Interestingly, the effects of liquidity on CIP deviations become more pronounced as bank regulation intensifies, reflecting interaction effects. One implication is that stricter regulations may amplify liquidity-related distortions, thereby increasing CIP deviations.

Since China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, its financial and economic ties with participating emerging markets have deepened. We examine whether this integration has strengthened the channels through which news and volatility in the Chinese stock market affect BRI stock markets. To this end, we estimate several parsimonious yet dynamically rich regressions, controlling for the influence of the US stock market, and compute short-run and long-run multipliers. Notably, we find that countries closer to China-geographically, in trade, and financially-experience greater short-run volatility contagion. However, long-run volatility spillovers remain approximately constant across most regions. We discuss the implications of these findings for investors, portfolio managers, and policymakers.

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In this paper, I address the issue of using fixed-event forecasts to track the evolution of rolling-event forecasts. This paper supplies a formal justification for the procedure of approximating rolling-event forecasts by averaging two fixed-event forecasts. I illustrate the methods with the computation of inflation expectations at various horizons.

Household surveys underreport incomes from the upper tail of the distribution, affecting our assessment about inequality. This paper offers a tractable simulation method to deal with this situation in the absence of extra information (e.g., tax records). The core of the method is to draw pseudodata from a mixture between the income empirical distribution and a parametric model for the upper tail, that aggregate to a preestablished top income share. We illustrate the procedure using Peruvian surveys that, as in the rest of Latin America, have displayed a sustained decrease in the Gini index since the 2000s. In a number of experiments, we impose a larger top income share than the one observed in the data, closer to corrected estimates for less egalitarian neighbors (e.g., Colombia and Chile). We find that even though the point estimates of the Gini index are biased, the corrected indices still decrease in time.

We study how the Chilean population's well-being responded to the strategy implemented by their health authorities, known as Dynamic Quarantine, to contain the spread of coronavirus in which municipalities periodically entered and exited lockdowns. This unique scheme, together with the population's socioeconomic heterogeneity, facilitates the estimation of changes in this well-being as differentiated by socioeconomic status. Using Google Trends to compute measures of well-being, we find strong evidence that socioeconomic status induces heterogeneity in these changes; thus, neglecting this heterogeneity may lead to misleading prescriptions for the public policy that addresses the psychological effects of lockdowns.

The media has prominently featured the totemic reproductive number R in its COVID-19 coverage despite being an imperfect measure of the degree of infectivity of the virus. As such, it conveys information to the public regarding the state of the pandemic that affects market sentiment. We analyze how news about R affects the volatility in stock markets worldwide and find that when R is greater than one, which means the spread of the disease should soar, it has a positive and significant effect on volatility. Our results hold after controlling for government interventions and several robustness checks.

Se presentan las principales conclusiones de este trabajo, asi como algunas reflexiones sobre cual creemos que podria ser el camino a seguir hacia la integracion de la economia peruana al mundo.

Rossini, R. (2016). La política monetaria

In this paper, we empirically investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on FX markets. We find important differences between COVID-19 and previous high-risk episodes: the Global Financial Crisis, the Swiss National Bank's removal of the Swiss franc/euro floor, and Brexit. Contrary to these episodes, the USD did not show any safe haven characteristics during the pandemic. Furthermore, the estimated volatility and non-parametric value-at-risk of three currency portfolios indicate that COVID-19 was not as risky as previous stressful events. We provide evidence that investors could minimize COVID-19 risk by investing in the Canadian dollar and the Japanese yen, and by reducing their exposure to European currencies.

The long-run behavior of real primary commodity prices, especially whether these series are trend stationary or contain a unit root, has been a topic of major debate in applied economics. In this paper, I perform a meta-analysis and combine the evidence of 12 representative studies on the subject in order to reach a unified conclusion about the presence of unit roots in these prices. The studies use different testing procedures, but share the common null hypothesis of a difference stationary process. Also, they use the individual price indices from the Grilli and Yang data set that is arguably one the most popular sources of long-term data on commodity prices. The combined evidence against unit roots in real primary commodity prices is strong: out of 24 cases, the unit root is not rejected in at most four. This rate means that real primary commodity prices are mean reverting and thus, to some degree, forecastable.

Conditional cash transfer programs have become instrumental in encouraging the use of formal health services in developing countries, but little is known about their effect on the use of low-quality informal care. Using a large survey of Peruvian rural households and a regression discontinuity design, we find a sizeable reduction in the use of informal health care providers not only by targeted but also by nontargeted members of households that qualify for the program. This indicates the existence of spillover effects within the household. We also provide evidence that beyond the direct increase in income, the availability of better information about institutional services is a potential mechanism that drives these effects.

Following the economic and political reforms of the 1990s, the Peruvian economy experienced two decades of exceptional growth in the 2000s. How was inequality affected by the strong growth performance of 2004-19? Which were the main factors associated with these inequality changes? The distribution of both income and consumption in Peru was highly unequal in 2004, with important geographic and regional differences. Since then, the degree of economic disparity decreased significantly associated with the exceptional growth of 2004–19. This decline in inequality was broad-based, yet it was not homogeneous across geographic areas, regions, or time. A correlate of this reduction in inequality has been a falling polarization. While wages and, to a lesser extent, government transfers accounted for most of the decline in income inequality, food prepared at home played a pivotal role in reducing consumption inequality, particularly in rural areas.

The performance of Latin American countries in reducing poverty and expanding the middle class has been remarkable. By taking a close look at the Peruvian experience, we examine how this aggregate behavior relates to business cycle conditions and whether different population groups share this behavior. We find that social mobility is cyclical; it decreases in recessions but increases with strong economic growth. The reduction in poverty in Peru appears to be the result of a sustained increase in the poverty exit rate together with a prolonged decrease in the poverty entry rate. These results hold among heterogeneous groups and are particularly marked for households regarded as initially disadvantaged.

Does the involvement of foreign third parties in the management of a country in the wake of a civil war have positive or negative economic effects? The approaches used to address this question in the social and political science literature are mostly qualitative and not sufficiently supported by quantitative evidence. This paper uses a quantitative analysis of the postconflict economic performance of Kosovo and East Timor under international administrations sponsored by the United Nations in the late 1990s. By using the synthetic control impact evaluation technique, we compute suitable counterfactual scenarios for each country to estimate the intervention effects of interest. We find a robust negative effect from the intervention on Kosovo, whereas the effect on East Timor is positive.