The Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America Project

The Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America Project was launched in 2013 to analyze economic data from the largest Latin America economies, to produce a comprehensive monetary and fiscal history of the region. The papers use a common conceptual framework and a comparable data set to narrate the economic histories of 11 Latin American countries since 1960. The authors are country experts who participated in numerous meetings over five years to discuss and receive feedback on their findings. The papers will be released at an event co-hosted with the Central Bank of Chile on August 24 in Santiago, followed by an event co-hosted with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) on September 24-25 in Washington, DC.

The project was organized and managed by the University of Chicago’s Fernando Alvarez and Lars Peter Hansen, the University of Minnesota’s Timothy Kehoe, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank’s Juan Pablo Nicolini, and New York University’s Thomas Sargent, also a Senior Fellow with UChicago’s Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics. These distinguished scholars will also summarize key findings from the collective country case studies to highlight the impacts of specific policy options. The findings of this project will offer lessons for future policy in Latin America and other regions of the world.

The final papers will be released as a book published by the University of Chicago Press during the first quarter of 2019. A unique data set drawing from these 11 countries will also be available in the fall of 2018.

More information on the papers, authors, and upcoming events can be found on our project page here.