El dilema de la estabilización: deuda, inflación y conflictividad política en tiempos de Alfonsín (1983-1989). With Emiliano Libman and Milagros Rodríguez. In Medio Siglo Entre Tormentas: Fluctuaciones, Crisis y Politicas Macroeconómicas en la Argentina 1948-2002. EUDEBA (2022). In Spanish.
This chapter examines the stabilisation dilemma faced by Raúl Alfonsín’s government (1983–1989): how to bring down a high and largely inertial inflation while servicing the foreign debt inherited from the military dictatorship, at a time when international credit markets were closed to Latin America. We review the first phase under Grinspun, the 1985 Austral Plan, which combined fiscal and monetary adjustment with heterodox tools to break inflation inertia (price and wage agreements, an exchange-rate anchor and the “desagio”), and the successive programmes of 1986–1988. The plan’s initial success could not be sustained: the international context and domestic social and political pressure prevented the fiscal and external adjustment it required. By 1989 stabilisation had failed, debt had risen from 30.7% to 63.3% of GDP, and the decade closed with hyperinflation and the early handover of power.
Real Exchange Rate Shocks and Labor Market Outcomes in an Emerging Economy: Evidence from Argentina. With Diego Friedheim, Roxana Maurizio and Tomás Álvarez. In Handbook of Labour Economics, edited by Jesús Ferreiro. Routledge (in preparation).
This chapter reviews what we know about how real exchange rate movements affect labor markets. We organize the literature around the main transmission channels: import competition in domestic markets, export demand, the cost of imported inputs, and balance-sheet effects through foreign-currency debt. We show how their relative importance depends on a sector’s trade orientation, its integration into global value chains, and the exchange rate regime. We then turn to the empirical strategies used to identify these effects, from aggregate time-series and sectoral panel regressions to designs that combine trade-weighted exposure measures with large, plausibly exogenous currency shocks. Throughout, we highlight the margins on which labor markets adjust (employment, wages, hiring and separations, and the informal sector) and how the answer differs between advanced and developing economies. As an illustration, we use Brazil’s 1999 devaluation, which hit Argentina while it was under a currency board, and administrative employment records to show how exposure to a neighbor’s devaluation translated into lower employment through fewer hires rather than lower wages. We close with open questions on persistence, heterogeneity across workers, and the interaction between exchange rate policy and labor market institutions.