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 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 have summarized key findings from the collective country case studies to highlight the impacts of specific policy options. The findings of this project offer lessons for future policy in Latin America and other regions of the world. Along with the scholarship represented in this book, the featured  economists in this project worked with BFI to create a dynamic database for the eleven Latin American countries under review (https://mafhola.uchicago.edu/), which will inform and inspire scholarship for years to come.