The purpose of this paper is to show that an affine model which incorporates the condition of no arbitrage enables improvements in forecasting the term structure of interest rates in Mexico. The three factors of the yield curve (level, slope and curvature) used in the model are estimated by the...

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...

For over five decades, diffusion indexes have been widely used by statistical and economic agencies as an instrument to summarize the dynamics of a group of disaggregated time-series economic data. In this note we revise the methods for constructing diffusion indexes, propose a novel generalized...