Julia Paxton

Technical Efficiency in the Rural Financial Sector: Evidence from Mexico

The void in the rural financial market in Mexico is more pronounced than ever given the retreat of many state programs. In response, small, heterogeneous semi-formal institutions have begun to fill the gap with financial services to rural Mexicans. This study sheds light on this largely undocumented sector by examining the technical efficiency of various institutional types. Data Envelopment Analysis is used to create a nonparametric frontier of technically efficient firms based on a sample of 350 semi-formal financial institutions. Using this framework, the heterogeneity of the sector is highlighted and most institutions are found to be highly inefficient. In a second stage of analysis, the primary determinants of efficiency are found to be institutional factors rather than client profiles.

Inflation stationarity during Latin American inflation: insights from unit root and structural break analysis

Inflation stationarity has important theoretical and policy implications, yet most of the literature has focused on low inflation countries. This article investigates inflation stationarity in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Bolivia during a hyperinflationary period from 1980 to 2004. We test for structural breaks in inflation, discuss the breaks in terms of changes in monetary regimes, and test if accounting for these structural breaks changes the nonstationarity results for those nations that ‘fail’ the traditional Augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) test for inflation. All five are found to have inflation rates that are I(0) once the structural breaks analysis is incorporated into our unit root tests.