Documento de Trabajo

Parental decisions in a choice based school system: Analyzing the transition between primary and secondary school

We study parental choice focusing on the transition between primary and secondary school, taking advantage of the fact that most Chilean students have to switch school at the end of the 8th grade, the last year of primary school. Using a recursive probit model we estimate jointly the probability of attending private voucher versus public

Games with Capacity Manipulation: Incentives and Nash Equilibria

Studying the interaction between preference and capacity manipulation in matching markets, we prove that acyclicity is a necessary and su!cient condition that guarantees the stability of a Nash equilibrium and the strategy-proofness of truthful capacity revelation under the hospital-optimal and intern-optimal stable rules. we then introduce generalized capacity manipulations games where hospitals move first and

Public-Private Wage Gap In Latin America (1999-2007): A Matching Approach

Using matching methods, we estimate the public-private wage gap in seven Latin American countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Paraguay and Uruguay—for the years 1999 and 2007. These methods do not require any estimation of earnings equations and hence no validity-out-of-the-support assumptions; furthermore, this approach allows us to estimate not only the average wage gap

Costly information acquisition. Better to toss a coin?

Citizens have little and uneven levels of political knowledge, consistently with the rational ignorance hypothesis. The paper presents a strategic model of common value elections with endogenous information acquisition accounting for these facts. It proves, that contrary to the most optimistic positions about direct democracy, majoritarian elections can fail to aggregate information, when voters have

Firm-Provided Training and Labor Market Institutions

This paper studies firm-provided training in the presence of the following labor market institutions: minimum wages, assistance unemployment benefits, firing costs, unions and severance payments. It shows that minimum wages, severance payments and unemployment benefits may either increase or decrease firm-provided training relative to a competitive labor market benchmark where firm-provided training takes place. In

Minimum wages strike back: the effects on capital and labor demands in a large-firm framework

We study the effect of a binding minimum wage on labor market outcomes, the accumulation of capital and welfare. We consider a large firm that invests in physical capital and hires several types of workers. Labor markets are characterized by search and matching frictions, while incomplete wage contracts allow workers to expropriate part of the

Comments on Donahue and Zeckhauser: Collaborative Governance

In times of straightened circumstances for governments in most developed countries, it becomes necessary to explore alternative, and perhaps better, means of providing the services that are usually delivered by governments. Since the late 1980t’s governments have explored the so-called Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), which attempt to delegate the provision of some of these services to

Causal Effects of Maternal Time-Investment on Children

Many social scientists hypothesize that the time mothers spend with their children is crucial for children’s cognitive development. Unlike most studies that investigate maternal employment effects on children, we estimate direct casual effects of time-diary measured maternal time using the CDS – PSID dataset. Considering maternal time allocation endogenous, the effect of an increase of

Towards a quantitative theory of automatic stabilizers: the role of demographics

Employment volatility is larger for young workers than for prime aged. At the same time, in economies with high tax rates the share of total market hours supplied by the young workers is smaller. These two observations imply a negative correlation between government size (measured by the share of taxes in total output) and aggregate

Investment and Environmental Regulation: Evidence on the Role of Cash Flow

We exploit the heterogeneity in pollution permits allocation and the variation in the permits price to identify a new channel by which cap-and-trade programs can affect firm decisions: they may affect investment through the impact of free pollution permits on the firms cash flow. A firm with a permit allocation higher than its emissions will

Inflation and welfare in long-run equilibrium with firm dynamics

We analyze the welfare cost of inflation in a model with cash-in-advance constraints and an endogenous distribution of establishments` productivities. Inflation distorts aggregate productivity through firm entry dynamics. The model is calibrated to the United States economy and the long-run equilibrium properties are compared at low and high inflation. We find that, when the period

Wage dispersion and Recruiting Selection

In this paper I introduce a novel source of residual wage dispersion. In the model, workers are heterogenous in productivity and randomly apply to ex ante identical posted vacancies. Each employer simultaneously meets several applicants, offers the position to the best candidate and bargains with her about the wage. Since the outside option of the