This paper analyzes the structural reform process that has been taking place in Uruguay since the return to democracy in 1985. Three main questions oriented the research: why reform? what kind of reform? and, how well did the reform perform? The main focus is on the pro-market reforms as they...

Most public pension systems failed to build trust funds, even when it was clear that they were becoming unsustainable in the long run. It is argued in this paper that politicians ruling public pension programs have strong incentives to exhaust the trust funds, distributing benefits among voters...

The Uruguayan pension system is one of the largest in Latin America relative to the country size. In 1995, the parliament passed a new pension law that introduced structural reforms in the system. The key goal of the reform was to restore intertemporal sustainability of the public budget, that...

There is a widespread feeling that welfare states are distorting incentives to a larger extent than what is socially optimal. In the present paper, this idea is formally analyzed with a model in which a benevolent government seeks to maximize the utility of risk-averse-opportunistic agents. The...

This paper shows that labor market policies and institutions have an impact on the effectiveness of economic reform programs. Countries with relatively 'rigid' labor markets experienced deeper recessions before adjustment and slower recoveries afterwards. Minimum wages and mandatory benefits are...

The empirical evidence presented in this paper casts doubts on the by now widely accepted “fact’’ that exchange rate based stabilization programs are expansionary. Even though these programs were associated with output booms, no evidence was found to support the thesis that the booms were...

We present a simple model of a benevolent government that provides insurance to risk averse individuals. As in macroeconomics, commitment to fully contingent rules is better than discretion, but when the government can only commit to simple rules, discretion may be the best available option. The...

We present a new database of social security indicators for 11 Latin-American countries designed to show how much they promise to pay in return to contributions. These are based on micro-simulations according to existing norms. We use response-surface analysis to characterize simulation results....

I analyze political agency models with potentially two equilibria, one in which elections are e¤ective selection mechanisms and only "good" individuals participate in politics and another one in which elections are not e¤ective and "bad" individuals participate in politics. These equilibria...

This paper discusses the welfare effects of trade in a Heckscher-Ohlin model of trade with costs of adjustment. The paper analyses the efficiency and the distributional effects of eliminating a tariff in a formerly protected sector. The tariff can be eliminated at the onset or after a while. In...