Documento de Trabajo

Renegotiation without Holdup: Anticipating Spending and Infrastructure Concessions

Infrastructure concessions are frequently renegotiated after investments are sunk, resulting in better contractual terms for the franchise holders. This paper offers a political economy explanation for renegotiations that occur with no apparent holdup. We argue that they are used by political incumbents to anticipate infrastructure spending and thereby increase the probability of winning an upcoming

La dinámica industrial y el financiamiento de las pyme

Las pyme pagan más que las empresas grandes por su financiamiento, se les exigen garantías, se las financia a plazos cortos y muchas no se pueden endeudar. Se piensa que estas prácticas son fallas de mercado que deberían corregirse con intervenciones regulatorias. Sin embargo, nosotros argumentamos que son respuestas apropiadas a (i) el mayor costo

Using School Scholarships to Estimate the Effect of Government Subsidized Private Education on Academic Achievement in Chile

This paper estimates the impact of private education on low-income students in Chile. We attempt to reduce selection bias by using reduced-tuition paying, low-income students in private schools as the treatment group, based on our finding that these students were, to some extent, randomly selected out of the public school control group. Propensity score matching

What Drives Capital Structure? Evidence from Chilean Panel Data

There is an extensive literature on the determinants of capital structure for developed countries, but little has been said about emerging economies. This article analyzes the driving forces of capital structure in Chile for the period 1990-2002. We study aggregate leverage and interest-bearing liabilities in isolation for all firms, and firms segmented by economic sector.

Portfolio management implications of volatility shifts: Evidence from simulated data

Based on weekly data of the Dow Jones Country Titans, the CBT-municipal bond, spot and futures prices of commodities for the period 1992-2005, we analyze the implications for portfolio management of accounting for conditional heteroskedasticity and structural breaks in long-term volatility. In doing so, we first proceed to utilize the ICSS algorithm to detect volatility

Forecasting crude oil and natural gas spot prices by classification methods

In this article, we forecast crude oil and natural gas spot prices at a daily frequency based on two classification techniques: artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM). As a benchmark, we utilize an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) specification. We evaluate out-of-sample forecast based on encompassing tests and mean-squared prediction error (MSPE).

Micro Efficiency and Aggregate Growth in Chile

Using plant-level data on Chilean manufacturing firms for the 1980-2001 period, we estimate and characterize disaggregate total factor productivity. We use these estimates to study the microeconomic sources of aggregate efficiency, a fundamental part of aggregate growth. By decomposing productivity dynamics into production reallocation and within plant efficiency changes, we find that reallocation accounted for

Privatizing Highways in the United States

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 (often only) source of income for the franchise holder is toll revenue. We

Market Power in Price-Regulated Power Industries

This paper analyzes market power in price-regulated power industries. We derive market equilibrium under different assumptions (perfect competition, monopoly, Cournot, etc.), with and without free entry. We show that when peak-load pricing is used, producers can exercise market power by increasing the share of peaking technology in the generation portfolio, compared to the welfare-maximizing configuration.

Market Reforms and Efficiency Gains in Chile

Starting in the mid 1970s, Chile implemented a deep and comprehensive set of structural market reforms. In spite of the wide agreement there is with respect to the expected benefits these reforms should have on growth, little evidence has been provided to empirically establish and to quantify this connection. Using plant-level data on Chilean manufacturing

The Effects on Firm Borrowing Costs of Bank M&As

Over the past few decades, banking systems in both mature and emerging markets have experienced a wave of consolidations, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A). These developments have raised a number of questions among researchers and policy makers. A key concern refers to whether bank mergers benefit or harm borrowers. The goal of this paper is

Cooperation and Network Formation

The present paper proposes a simple model for studying the interplay between self-enforcing cooperation and network formation. In particular, the model provides an answer to the ancient question of how cooperative behavior emerges in different communities and how the possibility of behaving cooperatively shapes the social structure of a community. In a sense, I provide