Mobility restrictions have the potential to accelerate automation. Using difference-indifferences and triple-differences empirical strategies, and leveraging cross-industry variation in mobility restrictions and within-industry variations in automation risk, this paper estimates the impact of...

We conducted two randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the impact of government-guaranteed loans offered by the Chilean and Colombian governments. The public funds of these programs greatly expanded following the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and offered loans to Micro, Small and...

Remittances constitute a significant safety net for millions of households in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Consequently, changes in international transfers can be a crucial agent of transmission of the COVID-19 induced economic crisis from richer to poorer nations and from urban to...

The COVID-19 pandemic generated a large negative external shock to the global economy. Businesses worldwide were affected by economic, health, and mobility restrictions that impacted consumers' ability to access goods and services and firms' profitability and survival rates. In this paper, we...

This paper introduces a novel monetary policy framework where the exchange rate becomes the central instrument. Using Singapore as a case study, it explores the Monetary Authority's adoption of the exchange rate as the primary tool since 1981, diverging from conventional approaches centered on...

Singapore's unique monetary policy consists of a managed exchange rate framework that can be characterized as a Taylor-like reaction function with the nominal devaluation rate instead of the nominal interest rate as the main policy instrument. We build a small open economy New Keynesian model to...

The Chilean system of housing finance is a mixture of public and private elements that has arguably been very successful. This paper provides an up- to-date review of the main instruments, actors, and government policies of the Chilean system of housing finance. It concludes that, while the...

We randomly assigned consumer loan requests (of random amount and length) to gender-balanced prospective-borrowers who then randomly submitted them to a representative sample of loan-officers from Chilean banks. We find that loan requests submitted by women are 18.3% less likely to be approved,...

When evaluating observably similar loan applications from men and women, do loan officers favor men? This paper randomly assigned loan requests of variable amounts to a balanced sample of male and female prospective borrowers who then submitted the assigned loan requests to randomly assigned...