This paper shows that the evolution of the level of Mexico real and real per capita output between 1895 and 2008 can be adequately described through a trendstationary model, affected by 4 structural breaks, which occurred at dates that seem to coincide with domestic institutional arrangements,...

Many countries in Africa suffer high rates of underemployment or low rates of productive employment; many also anticipate large numbers of people to enter the workforce in the near future. This paper asks the question: Are African firms creating fewer jobs than those located in other parts of...

We consider economic development of Sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of slow convergence of productivity, both across sectors and across firms within sectors. Why have “productivity enclaves”, islands of high productivity in a sea of smaller low-productivity firms, not diffused more...

This paper aims to measure the gross output loss due to misallocation of resources in Mexico during 2008-2018 and to study what determines this resource misallocation. To do so, I use an extension of Hsieh and Klenow (2009) and Mexican Economic Censuses. Alternatively, I estimate resource...

Financial institutions provide their customers a variety of unpriced services and cover their costs through interest margins - the interest rates they receive on assets are generally higher than the rates they pay on liabilities. In particular, banks pay below-public-market interest rates on...

We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by the current and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies...

This paper follows an algorithm that considers different dimensions of linkages across service and manufacturing industries to identify a cluster configuration of the Mexican economy and analyze their role in the economic performance of regions. It identifies 24 clusters and analyzes their...

We estimate a supply and demand model of private college education services in Mexico for the 2005-2019 period, in order to identify the factors that influenced the dynamics of their equilibrium prices. The model is estimated with two- and three-stage least squares using panel data at the state...

In this paper, I document the existence of unconditional convergence in labor productivity across Mexican states in three-digit manufacturing industries. The rate of convergence for the period 1988-2018 is 1.18% per year. However, this result does not hold at the aggregate level: I find no...

Between 2004 and 2018, the spread of wages in Mexico's private labor sector remained stable. Nonetheless, the underlying factors behind salary dispersion underwent significant shifts. To uncover these changes, we analyze an employer-employee dataset comprising the near-universe of Mexico's...