We study the relation between misallocation of resources, TFP and credit conditions using sectoral data from Mexican manufacturing industries between 2003 and 2010. We use a theory-based framework to account for TFP changes in the Mexican manufacturing sector due to changes in distortions in the...

We document how informal employment in Mexico is countercyclical, lags the cycle and is negatively correlated to formal employment. This contributes to explaining why total employment in Mexico displays low cyclicality and variability over the business cycle when compared to Canada, a developed...

Detrended Total Factor Productivity (TFP), net of changes in capital utilization, fell by 3.3% after the Korean 1997 financial crisis. We construct a small open economy model that accounts for 30.0% of the fall in response to a sudden stop of capital inflows and an increase in international...

This paper documents how informal employment in Mexico is countercyclical, lags the cycle and is negatively correlated to formal employment. This contributes to explaining why total employment in Mexico displays low cyclicality and variability over the business cycle when compared to Canada, a...

We study the relation between credit conditions, misallocation of resources, and total factor productivity (TFP) using sectoral data from Mexican manufacturing industries between 2003 and 2010. Our analysis uses a theory-based framework to account for TFP changes in the Mexican manufacturing...

The last twenty years have witnessed periods of sustained appreciations of the real exchange rate in emerging economies. The case of Mexico between 1988 and 2002 is representative of several episodes in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe in which countries opening to capital flows...

In recent research on financial crises, large exogenous shocks to total factor productivity (TFP) are used as the driving force accounting for large output falls. TFP fell 3% after the Korean 1997 financial crisis. We find evidence that the large fall in TFP is mostly due to a sectoral...

The standard argument says that in the presence of positive spillovers foreign direct investment should be promoted and subsidized. In contrast, this paper claims that the very existence of spillovers may require temporarily restricting FDI. Our argument is based on two features of spillovers:...

Total factor productivity (TFP) falls markedly during financial crises, as we document with recent evidence from Latin America and Asia. We study the ability of various versions of the small open economy neoclassical growth model to account for the behavior of inputs, output, and aggregate...