This study decomposes both the labor productivity gap and the labor productivity growth into the contributions of technical efficiency, capital deepening and technological change for Mexican manufacturing at the regional level. In order to do so, we apply a methodology that combines two...

In Mexico, the recent upsurge of the global food prices have affected, more than proportionately, the most margined sectors of the population. According with the present results, it is possible to conclude that, even though poverty is highly sensitive to food prices increase, the substitution...

We develop a methodology to estimate the actual exit time from poverty and the minimum necessary growth rate to eradicate it in a pre-determined period of time without assuming distributionally neutral income growth. We compare the exit time for the average poor (Kanbur, 1987) and the average...

We analyze empirically the effect of local transfers (public and private ones) on the probability of partisan alternant under two approaches: first alternant and consecutive alternant between two local administrations, this in the context of political clientelism theory and public-good provision...

In a typical developing country, coverage of the contributory social security system is low. We analyze the aggregate effects of a revenue-neutral fiscal-cum-social policy reform that consists of: 1) the implementation of universal social insurance to replace the system with low coverage; and 2)...

Current data provide macroeconomic information for a large number of countries and for a long period of time (macro panels). This causes that in these panels slope heterogeneity and cross-section dependence (CSD) are a rule rather than the exception, leading to fixed effects slope estimators to...

I review a contemporary branch of the informal sector literature that focus on understanding the way firm behavior is affected by the presence of informality and how such distortions have an impact on aggregate variables. The authors in this group all make use of dynamic general equilibrium...

We present evidence on the impact on students' math and reading scores of one of the largest deployments of an OLPC program and the only one implemented at a national scale: Plan Ceibal in Uruguay. We have unique data that allow us to know the exact date of laptop delivery for every student in...