Paper 1. This paper builds on the work of Stigler and Peltzman, who argue that regulators try to maximize political support from consumers and producers by determining a price between the competitive and monopolistic levels. My model considers that a regulator's behavior might change with the...

The current financial instability experienced by Latin American countries, with the persistence of high and unstable inflation, was in part the motivation behind this project. Particularly, this work provides theoretical and empirical support to the idea of "non-neutrality" of the financial...

The two papers of this dissertation focus on the role of financial intermediaries in the economic development of Colombia.

This dissertation tries to test, from the empirical evidence from Brazil, the validity or not of the inclusion of two new variables in the traditional neoclassical growth model: Public capital and infrastructure capital. We check for the stationarity of the data and run two models: One with...

The debate about the uniqueness of bank loans has been around for sometime and in spite of that, no conclusive agreement has been drawn from empirical studies.

This paper mainly focuses on finding optimal strategies for the development of microfinance in Korea and on predicting the impact of microfinance in the future.First, this paper reviews and assesses the impact of microfinance in Korea. I suggested that recent phenomena of income polarization and...

The dramatic growth performances of the newly industrializing countries (NICs) have led many economists to call them "economic miracles", and have drawn considerable attention to the hypothesis of export-led growth (ELG). In this dissertation we analyze the contribution of the export sector to...

This research explores the relationship between economic growth and trade sector performance in the context of the Italian experience over the post-Second World War period. In order to address the effects of external sector growth on Italy's pattern of industrialization and its overall economic...

This dissertation is a collection of three essays on high school dropout by adolescents and the roll of their siblings in this risky behavior. Dropping out of high school can scar the individual for his entire labor supply period with lower earnings, higher unemployment, and in turn incur...

The purpose of this dissertation is to construct an economywide simulation model of Brazil which serves as a tool to quantify the effects of alternative inflation stabilization policies on the distribution of income. The model includes five household classes, five production sectors, four types...