This paper studies the relationship between the marginalist revolution and the use of the mathematical method in economics. A first version of this work was written as a term paper when I was a student of George Stigler at the University of Chicago. The present version has been benefited from his comments and suggestions, as well as from the original bibliographical references provided by professor Stigler.

Ten years ago Sargent and Wallace [1981] provided with the simple and elegant analysis that has now become the classic "unpleasant monetarist arithmetic": a fall in the rate of monetary expansion without a corresponding fall in the primary deficit is not only doomed to be transitory, but will eventually bring about an inflation rate higher than before the change.

Abstract The permanent income/transitory income distinction from consumption functions can be applied to cost functions. Transitory deviations of actual output from potential output, i.e., variations in capacity utilization, are relevant to the U-shaped average cost pattern found in econometric studies. Data from retail banks in Argentina are used to illustrate this issue, with the number of branches as a proxy for potential output, and product per branch as a proxy for the utilization level.

It is usually asserted that political instability significantly lowers private investment, as well as economic growth, since it has adverse influence on property rights, and by that on investment and growth (i.e., Robert Barro, 1991; Ross Levine & David Renelt, 1992; Paolo Mauro, 1994; Edgardo Zablotsky, 1994).

Este trabajo recopila una serie de documentos escritos mayoritariamente durante la última década. El tema común son los movimientos de capitales y sus efectos sobre variables cruciales de la economía, tales como la inflación, el crecimiento, el tipo real de cambio y el equilibrio comercial.

Desde épocas bastante primitivas de la banca, el retiro generalizado de depósitos fue una ocupación permanente. El concepto de "riesgo sistémico" es el que mejor representa esta ocupación, y su persistencia a través de los siglos como uno de los principales problemas de la banca radica en la interpretación de que es un riesgo no diversificable.

A recurrent feature of economies that alternate between periods of high and low inflation is that they also alternate between periods of high and low real exchange rates, as the experience of Argentina shows.

As the recent Mexican crisis vividly illustrates, Latin American countries often go through boom-bust cycles caused by both domestic policies and external shocks. Such cycles are typically magnified by weak bank-ing systems which intermediate large capital inflows. This paper develops a simple optimizing model to analyze how the banking sector affects the propagation of shocks. In particular, we show how the world business cycle and shocks to the banking system affect output and employment through fluctuations in bank credit.