Documento de Trabajo

Costly information acquisition. Better to toss a coin?

Citizens have little and uneven levels of political knowledge, consistently with the rational ignorance hypothesis. The paper presents a strategic model of common value elections with endogenous information acquisition accounting for these facts. It proves, that contrary to the most optimistic positions about direct democracy, majoritarian elections can fail to aggregate information, when voters have

Firm-Provided Training and Labor Market Institutions

This paper studies firm-provided training in the presence of the following labor market institutions: minimum wages, assistance unemployment benefits, firing costs, unions and severance payments. It shows that minimum wages, severance payments and unemployment benefits may either increase or decrease firm-provided training relative to a competitive labor market benchmark where firm-provided training takes place. In

Minimum wages strike back: the effects on capital and labor demands in a large-firm framework

We study the effect of a binding minimum wage on labor market outcomes, the accumulation of capital and welfare. We consider a large firm that invests in physical capital and hires several types of workers. Labor markets are characterized by search and matching frictions, while incomplete wage contracts allow workers to expropriate part of the

Comments on Donahue and Zeckhauser: Collaborative Governance

In times of straightened circumstances for governments in most developed countries, it becomes necessary to explore alternative, and perhaps better, means of providing the services that are usually delivered by governments. Since the late 1980t’s governments have explored the so-called Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), which attempt to delegate the provision of some of these services to

Causal Effects of Maternal Time-Investment on Children

Many social scientists hypothesize that the time mothers spend with their children is crucial for children’s cognitive development. Unlike most studies that investigate maternal employment effects on children, we estimate direct casual effects of time-diary measured maternal time using the CDS – PSID dataset. Considering maternal time allocation endogenous, the effect of an increase of

Towards a quantitative theory of automatic stabilizers: the role of demographics

Employment volatility is larger for young workers than for prime aged. At the same time, in economies with high tax rates the share of total market hours supplied by the young workers is smaller. These two observations imply a negative correlation between government size (measured by the share of taxes in total output) and aggregate

Investment and Environmental Regulation: Evidence on the Role of Cash Flow

We exploit the heterogeneity in pollution permits allocation and the variation in the permits price to identify a new channel by which cap-and-trade programs can affect firm decisions: they may affect investment through the impact of free pollution permits on the firms cash flow. A firm with a permit allocation higher than its emissions will

Teachers’ Salaries in Latin America. How Much are They (under or over) Paid?

How much are teachers paid in comparison to those in other professions in Latin America? How have these differences evolved in recent years? Is teachers’ underpayment more pronounced in certain segments of the labor markets? This paper documents answers for those questions using data for thirteen Latin-American countries circa 1997 and circa 2007. After controlling

Acyclicity and Singleton Cores in Matching Markets

This paper analyzes the role of acyclicity in singleton cores. We show that the absence of simultaneous cycles is a sufficient condition for the existence of singleton cores. Furthermore, acyclicity in the preferences of either side of the market is a minimal condition that guarantees the existence of singleton cores. If firms or workers preferences

Parental decisions in a choice based school system: Analyzing the transition between primary and secondary school

We study parental choice focusing on the transition between primary and secondary school, taking advantage of the fact that most Chilean students have to switch school at the end of the 8th grade, the last year of primary school. Using a recursive probit model we estimate jointly the probability of attending private voucher versus public

Economic Performance, creditor protection and labor inflexibility

We present a static general equilibrium model of an economy with agents with heterogeneous wealth and endogenous credit constraints created by partial loan recovery rates. Higher loan recovery rates and better bankruptcy protection increase output and credit penetration, while the former raises the average interest rate spread and the latter decreases it. We also study

Effective Schools do Exist: Low Income Children’s Academic Performance in Chile

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we show that despite students’ disadvantaged backgrounds and despite not having more financial resources than similar schools, there are schools in Chile that serve low income students and that obtain superior academic outcomes. Second, we present qualitative evidence to identify school and classroom processes that might explain