Some authors argue that informality is associated with distorted firm decisions and inefficiency. In this paper, I assess the quantitative effect of incomplete tax enforcement on aggregate output and productivity using a dynamic general equilibrium framework. I calibrate the model using data for...

Using a novel biographical database including all Presidents and presidential candidates in Colombia for the period 1833-2010 I show that the value of a political connection can be quantified in terms of the votes transferred within a political network. I consider three types of political...

We use a novel data set on firm vacancies and job seekers from a Mexican government job placement service to analyze whether changes in matching frictions can explain the large and persistent increase in Mexican unemployment after the 2008 global financial crisis. We find evidence of a...

In the firm's competitive strategy act together their financial decision and their decisions in the product markets. Even if in the last three decades the theoretical and empirical literature has growth, still are topics few explored. One of them is the relationship between firm's asset...

I propose a model of cultural transmission where children interact strategically with each other with the only desire to fit in, and parents purposefully socialize their children to their own culture. In the empirical section I estimate parental and peer effects using US teenager data on...

We study variations in the risk-neutral distributions of the exchange rates in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru due to interventions implemented by these countries. For this purpose, we first estimate the risk-neutral densities of the exchange rates based on derivatives market data, for...

his paper represents the first application of a novel strategy to estimate peer effects in education in a developing country. It provides evidence on peer effects in standardized tests by exploiting a unique data set on social networks in Uruguayan primary schools. The identification method...

Stochastic Weather Generators (SWGs) try to replicate the stochastic patterns of climatological variables characterized by high dimensionality, non-normal probability density functions and non-linear dependence relationships. However, conventional SWGs usually typify weather variables with not...

How did small exporters fare relative to large exporters during the 2008-09 crisis? Examining the performance of Mexican exporters reveals that the crisis did not make smaller exporters more likely to exit, grow less, or expand less their product line relative to larger exporters. Workhorse...

In this paper, we develop a new model-based method to inference on totals and averages of nite populations segmented in planned domains or strata. Within each stratum, we decompose the total as the sum of its sampled and unsampled parts, making inference on the unsampled part using Bayesian...