This is a comprehensive study of regional Foreign Direct Investment in Chile and its relationship with the development of Chilean regions. Following a process of steady foreign capitals flows to Chile, the link of this phenomenon with the growth of Chilean Regions are explored in three main...

The dissertation consists of three essays. The first one is an econometric essay on inflation stabilization in Brazil during a period of successive unsuccessful stabilization attempts. The impact on relative prices and the desirability of income policies to fight inflation are addressed. A...

The analysis undertaken in this study is motivated by the new economic environment faced by Brazil's industry since the early 1990s. In addition to the set of price stabilization policies that the country had already been struggling with during the 1980s, major economic reforms towards a greater...

Traditional neoclassical microeconomic theory views the production function as a "black box" where homogenous inputs go in and output comes out. Differences in labor productivity between firms are mainly due to technological constraints facing the firm.

Over the last several decades, manufacturers in the developed countries have adopted organizational techniques collectively referred to as lean production. An essential element of the lean production model is the specialization and decentralization of production decisions throughout the supply...

The empirical evidence presented here seems to suggest a positive relationship between economic growth and "openness" to international trade in the Brazilian experience from the 60's to the 90's. Estimates of total factor productivity growth, incorporating human capital, seemed positively...

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...