This paper studies the role played by several financial and economic indicators in determining the process of bank failure in Argentina after the Mexican crisis known as the “tequila effect”. Due to the relative scarcity of previous studies, this paper priorizes the use of semiparametric and...

This paper proposes new simple testing procedures for the joint null hypothesis of absence of persistent e®ects in the form of random e®ects and ¯rst order serial correlation in the error component model. The fact that the presence of random effects is clearly of a one-sided nature, together...

This paper shows that the standard Newey-West GMM based test is sensitive to the presence of locally misspecified alternatives. In particular, such test is shown to have incorrect size when the null model is locally contaminated, making the test spuriously reject the null hypothesis even when it...

This paper proposes simple tests to detect dynamic and random effects in linear panel data models, in the form of lagged dependent variables and random effects. We use the analytical framework of Bera and Yoon (1993) to derive tests for the presence of random effects, lagged dependent variables,...

This paper considers the practical problem of distributing a fixed budget for poverty alleviation to a population whose poverty status is not directly observable. The solution we propose improves on the techniques that are commonly used in practice by taking both the concavity of the social...

We analyze the emergence of large-scale education systems in a framework where growth is associated with changes in the conguration of the economy. We model the incentives that the economic elite could have (collectively) to accept taxation destined to nance the education of credit-constrained...

We provide evidence on the impact of a large construction of pre-primary school facilities in Argentina. We estimate the causal impact of the program on pre-primary school attendance and maternal labor supply. Identification relies on a differences-in-differences strategy where we combine...