Documento de Trabajo

Competition with asymmetric switching costs

We analyze the effects of asymmetric switching costs on two identical firms that produce an homogeneousgood and compete in prices. Both firms inherit a fraction of themarket which is “locked-in” by the switching costs. When switching costs are low, firms face a tradeoff between charging a high price to their locked in customers, or pricing

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

Renegotiation without Holdup: Anticipating Spending and Infrastructure Concessions

Infrastructure concessions are frequently renegotiated after investments are sunk, resulting in better contractual terms for the franchise holders. This paper offers a political economy explanation for renegotiations that occur with no apparent holdup. We argue that they are used by political incumbents to anticipate infrastructure spending and thereby increase the probability of winning an upcoming

La dinámica industrial y el financiamiento de las pyme

Las pyme pagan más que las empresas grandes por su financiamiento, se les exigen garantías, se las financia a plazos cortos y muchas no se pueden endeudar. Se piensa que estas prácticas son fallas de mercado que deberían corregirse con intervenciones regulatorias. Sin embargo, nosotros argumentamos que son respuestas apropiadas a (i) el mayor costo

Using School Scholarships to Estimate the Effect of Government Subsidized Private Education on Academic Achievement in Chile

This paper estimates the impact of private education on low-income students in Chile. We attempt to reduce selection bias by using reduced-tuition paying, low-income students in private schools as the treatment group, based on our finding that these students were, to some extent, randomly selected out of the public school control group. Propensity score matching

What Drives Capital Structure? Evidence from Chilean Panel Data

There is an extensive literature on the determinants of capital structure for developed countries, but little has been said about emerging economies. This article analyzes the driving forces of capital structure in Chile for the period 1990-2002. We study aggregate leverage and interest-bearing liabilities in isolation for all firms, and firms segmented by economic sector.

Portfolio management implications of volatility shifts: Evidence from simulated data

Based on weekly data of the Dow Jones Country Titans, the CBT-municipal bond, spot and futures prices of commodities for the period 1992-2005, we analyze the implications for portfolio management of accounting for conditional heteroskedasticity and structural breaks in long-term volatility. In doing so, we first proceed to utilize the ICSS algorithm to detect volatility

Forecasting crude oil and natural gas spot prices by classification methods

In this article, we forecast crude oil and natural gas spot prices at a daily frequency based on two classification techniques: artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM). As a benchmark, we utilize an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) specification. We evaluate out-of-sample forecast based on encompassing tests and mean-squared prediction error (MSPE).

Micro Efficiency and Aggregate Growth in Chile

Using plant-level data on Chilean manufacturing firms for the 1980-2001 period, we estimate and characterize disaggregate total factor productivity. We use these estimates to study the microeconomic sources of aggregate efficiency, a fundamental part of aggregate growth. By decomposing productivity dynamics into production reallocation and within plant efficiency changes, we find that reallocation accounted for

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