Documento de Trabajo

Idiosyncratic Productivity Shocks and Plant-Level Heterogeneity

Using plant-level data on Chilean manufacturing firms for the 1980-99 period, we estimate and characterize disaggregate total factor productivity. We show that idiosyncratic productivity shocks are a quantitatively relevant source of the observed heterogeneity in the behavior of plants. Both exit and input demand decisions are correlated with our estimates of plant level productivity. We

Algunas Aplicaciones de Economía Ambiental en Chile (Some applications of environmental economics in Chile)

A Developing Country View on Liberalization of Tariff and Trade Barriers

The key issue of the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) is the following: What type of OMC rules would maximize the rate of development of developing countries? In this short note, we provide a short synthesis of developed countries disturbing trade barriers which affect negatively developing countries export growth. Also, we suggest some guidelines which would

Principios para Tarificar la Transmisión Eléctrica (Principals for the price fixing of electricity transmission)

El propósito de este artículo es establecer los principios económicos que deben regir el cálculo de las tarifas de transmisión de energía cuando se utiliza el modelo tradicional de peak-load pricing para tarificar la energía y la potencia. Los sistemas de transmisión cumplen tres funciones distintas: transportar energía, sustituir capacidad de generación y aumentar la

Labor Market Distortions, Employment and Growth: The Recent Chilean Experience

The per capita growth rate of Chile from 1984 to 1997 was among the highest in the world. During recent years, however, per capita growth dropped significantly. This paper discusses the role of factor accumulation and the efficiency with which factors are used, measured as total factor productivity (TFP), to explain the evolution of output

Strategies That Work When Property Rights Don

In many sectors property rights over knowledge and information are weak as they are embodied in employees, competitors can copy or customers can pirate. Yet comprehensive studies show that firms systematically invest in these assets. We offer a simple taxonomy of strategies that firms use to cope with weak property rights. We classify these strategies

The Privatization of Social Services in Chile: an Evaluation

We examine the privatization of Chilean social services that began in 1981. We conclude that the reform has had a positive impact by providing competition to public providers (health and education) and insulation from political capture (pension funds). The major lesson, however, is that the full benefits from privatization-cum-competition are slow to arrive and require

Wealth Accumulation, Credit Card Borrowing, and Consuption-Income Comovement

Extremal Dependence in Exchange Markets

Exchanges rate markets exhibit correlation in the short run, but the issue is whether such correlation lingers over long periods of time, and under extreme events (i.e., either large appreciations or depreciations). In this paper, we analyze dependence between nominal exchange rates under extreme events for a sample of ten countries with dirty/free float regimes

La regulación del transporte de carga en Santiago: Características, evaluación y propuestas (Regulation of trucking in Santiago: characteristics, evaluation, and proposals)

Este trabajo caracteriza cuantitativamente el transporte de carga en Santiago (a partir de Citra [1995]) y evalúa las regulaciones vigentes. La mayoría son restricciones cuantitativas al uso de las vías y son percibidas como erráticas e inciertas por los agentes. Estas restricciones no sólo son costosas sino también inefectivas porque el principal determinante de los

Liquidity and the Simple IO of Stock Exchanges

It is usually thought that network externalities, which are inherent to liquidity, make it desirable to concentrate transactions in one stock exchange. This paper shows that when the value of liquidity stems from the ability of potentially reach as many traders as possible, the market is integrated when every broker meets every other broker in

What Drives Replacement of Durable Goods at the Micro Level?

Technological innovations have contributed over the years to an increasing stock of durable goods – those products that are not immediately consumed but provide a stream of services over a long period of time. Indeed, virtually every household in a modern economy owns a refrigerator, a personal computer and an automobile. Given the inter-temporal nature