Documento de Trabajo

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

Copula-based measures of dependence structure in assets returns

Copula modeling has become an increasingly popular tool in finance to model assets returns dependency. In essence, copulas enable us to extract the dependence structure from the joint distribution function of a set of random variables and, at the same time, to separate the dependence structure from the univariate marginal behavior. In this study, based

Asimetrías en la Respuesta de los Precios de la Gasolina en Chile

Un Análisis Econométrico del Consumo Mundial de Celulosa

En este trabajo se especifica y estima un modelo econométrico para el consumo de celulosa a nivel mundial y desagregado según los principales países consumidores. El modelo utilizado corresponde a uno de demanda derivada para una firma productora de papel representativa que demandará celulosa como un insumo más para su producción. Esta demanda es posteriormente

The Old and the New Reform of Chile’s Power Industry

Chile’s regulatory framework introduced in 1981 remained unchanged for more than 20 years. The reform had a positive effect but several warning signals appeared by the end of the 90s indicating the need to introduce changes. The most important problems were the lack of competition in the generation segment and the reluctance to expand capacity.

Socioeconomic status or noise? Tradeoffs in the generation of school quality information

This paper calculates a time series of simple, standard measures of schools’ relative performance. These are drawn from a 1997-2004 panel of Chilean schools, using individual-level information on test scores and student characteristics for each year. The results suggest there is a stark tradeoff in the extent to which rankings generated using these measures: i)

Mergers and CEO power

In this paper a simple model of mergers in which synergies, private benefits and CEO power play a crucial role is proposed. A merger is modeled as a bargaining process between the acquiring and target board with the gains from a merger divided according to Rubinstein’s alternating-offer game with inside options. Boards consider both firm

Task-Specific Training and Job Design

This paper provides a simple theoretical framework based on a new type of human capital introduced by Gibbons and Waldman (2004), called task-specific training, to understand job design. Mainly, in the presence of task-specific training, promotions might result ex-post in the underutilization of human capital and thus firms at the time of designing jobs should

Performance of an economy with credit constraints, bankruptcy and labor inflexibility

We present a static general equilibrium model of an economy with agents with heterogenous wealth and endogenous credit constraints due to moral hazard. Credit constraints give rise to inefficiencies which are larger if wealth is distributed more unequally. We show that increases in the loan recovery rate improve the efficiency of the economy and raise