Great vox piece

with great pictures too. Here

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Macro Data 4 STATA

is now public http://sites.google.com/site/md4stata/.

This is Alex Tabarrok on MR. One commenter suggests to install Kountry. I did not now about it and it's indeed very cool (however, I am not sure that it is more useful than Md4Stata, they are both useful and I think that they complement each other)

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New paper on "Old Bonds"

Conflicts of Interest, Reputation, and the Interwar Debt Crisis: Banksters or Bad Luck?
(with Marc Flandreau and Norbert Galliard)

This paper builds a new dataset with detailed information on the universe of
foreign government bonds issued in New York in the 1920s and uses these data to
describe the behavior of the financial intermediaries which operated in the New
York market during the period leading to the interwar debt crisis. The paper
starts by showing that concerns over reputation played an important role in
intermediaries‘ underwriting choices. Next, the paper checks whether banks
managed to charge abnormal underwriting fees on bonds that would eventually
default and finds no evidence of such practice (―banksterism‖). The paper
concludes by discussing some parallels between the experience of the 1920s and
the current debate on the "originate and distribute" model.

The paper is here
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Social mobility in Italy: The second lowest in the OECD

The paper is here

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New paper with Ricardo Hausmann on abstinence versus redemption

Abstract:

This paper updates our previous work on the level and evolution of original sin. It shows that while the number of countries that issue local-currency debt in international markets has increased in the past decade, this improvement has been quite modest. Although we find that countries have been borrowing at home, thanks to deepening domestic markets, we document that foreign participation in these markets is more limited than what is usually assumed. The paper shows that the recent decline of currency mismatches and the consequent ability to conduct countercyclical macroeconomic policies is due to lower net debt (abstinence) and not to redemption from original sin. We conclude that original sin continues to make financial globalization unattractive and developing countries have opted for abstinence because foreign currency debt is too risky. The promised paradise of financial globalization will need to wait for redemption from original sin.

The full paper is here.
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Redemption or Abstinence

Our (Ricardo Hasumann and I) new piece on original sin is here.

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