Documento de Trabajo

Política comercial estratégica en el mercado aéreo chileno

Se estudia la política comercial desde un punto de vista estratégico. En particular interesa examinar las condiciones bajo las cuales es apropiada una política de reciprocidad (a diferencia de una apertura unilateral). La política de reciprocidad se basa en la idea que el país con el que se negocia un acuerdo estará más dispuesto a

Pricing with markups in industries with increasing marginal costs

We study a game that models a market in which heterogeneous producers of perfect substitutes make pricing decisions in a first stage, followed by consumers that select a producer that sells at lowest price. As opposed to Cournot or Bertrand competition, producers submit a price function to the market, which maps their production level to

A large firm model of the labor market with entry, exit and search frictions

I augment the standard large-firm matching model with a firm process of entry and exit. This extension requires the analysis of firm-level dynamics, which I present in this note. I also show the equivalence of the model with the one-worker firm model from Pissarides (2000).
JEL: J63.

A Note on the Comparative Statics of Optimal Procurement Auctions

We find a necessary and sufficient condition such that a distributional upgrade on a seller’s cost implies a lower expected procurement cost for a buyer. We also show that even under the strongest assumption about this upgrade made in the literature so far, the seller can be worse off, even if this upgrade is costless.

School markets: The impact of information approximating school effectiveness

The impact of competition on academic outcomes is likely to depend on whether parents are informed about schools’ effectiveness or valued added (which may or may not be correlated with absolute measures of their quality), and on whether this information influences their school choices. To explore these issues, this paper considers Chile’s SNED program, which

Marginal Cost Pricing in Hydro-Thermal Power Industries: Is a Capacity Charge Always Needed?

This paper explores marginal cost pricing in hydro-thermal power industries. As in standard peak-load pricing for all-thermal electric systems, pricing consists of an energy charge and a capacity charge. However, the marginal cost of hydro generation now includes the value of water, which is determined endogenously. In turn, the capacity charge equals the marginal cost

What to put on the table

This paper investigates under which circumstances negotiating simultaneously over multiple issues or assets helps reduce inefficiencies due to the presence of asymmetric information. We find that a simultaneous negotiation over multiple assets that are substitutes reduces inefficiencies. The effect is stronger if goods are heterogeneous, and in this case the inefficiency can be eliminated altogether.

Estimating Discount Functions with Consumption Choices over the Lifecycle

Intertemporal preferences are difficult to measure. We estimate time preferences using a structural buffer stock consumption model and the Method of Simulated Moments. The model includes stochastic labor income, liquidity constraints, child and adult dependents, liquid and illiquid assets, revolving credit, retirement, and discount functions that allow short-run and long-run discount rates to differ. Data

The Basic Public Finance of Public-Private Partnerships

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) cannot be justified because they free public funds. When PPPs are desirable because the private sector is more efficient, the contract that optimally trades demand risk, user-fee distortions and the opportunity cost of public funds is characterized by a minimum revenue guarantee and a cap on the firm’s revenues. Yet income guarantees

Sustitución entre Telefonía Fija y Móvil en Chile

En este trabajo se estudia el grado de sustitución entre la telefonía fija y móvil en Chile. Los resultados muestran que la posesión de al menos un teléfono móvil en el hogar reduce el gasto promedio mensual en teléfono fijo en aproximadamente $5400 (31%). A pesar de lo anterior, el cambio estimado en el gasto

Note on Optimal Auctions

This paper considers a general optimal auction problem, with many goods and with a buyer’s utility that can depend non-linearly in his type. We point out that incentive compatibility constraints may be binding even if virtual utilities are strictly increasing in the buyer’s type. More importantly, optimal mechanisms may involve randomizations between different allocations.

The behavior of stock returns in the Asia-Pacific mining industry following the Iraq war

In this article, we pursue to determine which mining firms have seen their stock returns become more sensitive to fluctuations in energy prices, over a time period predominated by the political turmoil caused by 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. By resorting to wavelets and spatial statistics, we characterize the behavior of volatility and