On September 24 and 25, 2018, the Research Department at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) together with the Becker Friedman Institute’s Macro Finance Research Program (MFR) at the University of Chicago hosted a conference on The Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America. The conference took place at IDB’s headquarters in Washington D.C. The event brought together notable economists from academic and policy institutions to discuss comprehensive comparative studies on the fiscal and monetary history of seven Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay). These studies are the result of a project sponsored by MFR and organized by Lars Peter Hansen (University of Chicago), Fernando Alvarez (University of Chicago), Timothy Kehoe (University of Minnesota), Juan Pablo Nicolini (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis), and Thomas Sargent (New York University), in which country experts worked together to create a set of papers that narrate the economic history of eleven Latin American countries since 1960 using a common conceptual framework and comparable datasets. The main goal of this event was to discuss the findings from this research, helping enhance our understanding of economic crises in these regions, and offer lessons for economies around the world.
The conference consisted of separate sessions for each country, together with a presentation by Fernando Alvarez (University of Chicago) on the project, and a policy panel on the current fiscal and monetary challenges for Latin America. The panel had Andrew Powell (IDB) as moderator, and Joaquim Levy (World Bank), Lars Peter Hansen (University of Chicago), Carmen Reinhart (Harvard), and Alejandro Werner (International Monetary Fund) as panelists.
For more information, please contact Diana Petrova, MFR Associate Director, at dpetrova@uchicago.edu.