Documento de Trabajo

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

Teachers’ Salaries in Latin America. How Much are They (under or over) Paid?

How much are teachers paid in comparison to those in other professions in Latin America? How have these differences evolved in recent years? Is teachers’ underpayment more pronounced in certain segments of the labor markets? This paper documents answers for those questions using data for thirteen Latin-American countries circa 1997 and circa 2007. After controlling

Acyclicity and Singleton Cores in Matching Markets

This paper analyzes the role of acyclicity in singleton cores. We show that the absence of simultaneous cycles is a sufficient condition for the existence of singleton cores. Furthermore, acyclicity in the preferences of either side of the market is a minimal condition that guarantees the existence of singleton cores. If firms or workers preferences

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

The economics of infrastructure finance: Public-private partnerships versus public provision

We examine the economics of infrastructure finance, focusing on public provision and public-private partnerships (PPPs). We show that project finance is appropriate for PPP projects, because there are few economies of scope and assets are project specific. Furthermore, we suggest that the higher cost of finance of PPPs is not an argument in favour of

Cost of Moral Hazard and Limited Liability in the Principal-Agent Problem

In this paper we quantify the potential social-welfare loss due to the existence of limited liability in the principal-agent problem. The worst-case welfare loss is defined as the largest possible ratio between the social welfare when the agent chooses the effort that is optimal for the system and that of the sub-game perfect equilibrium of