Mediante una evaluación detallada de la estructura tributaria chilena vigente en 1996, mostramos que cambios bastante más drásticos que aquellos considerados en la discusión pública no afectan de manera importante la distribución del ingreso que se obtiene después de cobrar impuestos pero...

This report describes and evaluates the present state of the Chilean infrastructure concessions program. This program is leading to a complete upgrade of Chile's highway system and has been recently extended to seaports. The main principles underlying the economics of franchising are examined...

En esta nota respondemos a los comentarios de Michael Klein y Jean Tirole a nuestra propuesta de licitar concesiones viales interurbana por menor valor presente de los ingresos (MVPI). En la primera parte elaboramos sobre tres temas discutidos por Tirole: cuál debe ser el objeto del Estado...

When are public-private partnerships (PPPs) better than conventional provision and regulated privatization? And should PPP contracts be structured and governed when this is the case?. We show that the defining features of a PPP are (i) bundling of construction and operation, (ii) private but...

Government guarantees for private infrastructure projects reduce the incentives of firms to perform efficiently, weaken the incentives to screen projects for white elephants, and shift government obligations to future periods. Thus the uses of guarantees needs to be limited, and they need to be...

Latin American governments progressively substituted build–operate–and–transfer (BOT) contracts for government–provided highways during the nineties. Because under BOT a private franchise holder finances and operates the road in exchange for tolls, it is often claimed that BOT represents...

It has become increasingly common to allocate highway franchises to the bidder that offers to charge the lowest toll. Often, building a highway increases the value of land held by a small group of developers, an effect that is more pronounced with lower tolls. We study the welfare implications...

We build a conceptual framework to analyze the virtues and limitations of alternative mechanisms that can be used to auction a highway. We argue that current mechanisms, which fix the term of the franchise, create unnecesary risk and facilitate post-contract opportunism by the regulator and the...

Major increases in congestion over the last two decades, combined with troubled government finances, have made private toll-roads increasingly attractive in the United States. Road privatization consists in having a private firm build, operate and maintain the road for many decades. The main...

This paper quantifies the direct impact of taxes on income distribution at the household level in Chile and estimates the distributional effect of several changes in the tax structure. We find that income distributions before and after taxes are very similar (Gini coefficients of 0.488 and...