This brief essay reviews the macro framework of oil and economy in Mexico in the early days of the oil industry, from 1900 to 1938. The first section displays the figures of production at the world level and shows how Mexico become a major oil producer in the 1920s. The second section look at...

Building on the idea that members of religious communities insure each other against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious communities should be more widespread where populations face greater common risk. Our empirical analysis exploits rainfall risk as a source of common...

In absence of comparable macroeconomic indicators for most of the Latin American economies beyond the 1930s, this paper presents an estimate of the apparent consumption per head of coal and petroleum for 25 countries of Latin American and the Caribbean for the year 1925, doubling the number of...

We propose a model in which economic relations and institutions in advanced and less developed economies differ as these societies have access to different amounts of information. This lack of information makes it hard to give the right incentives to managers and entrepreneurs. We argue that...

In the absence of comparable macroeconomic indicators for most of the Latin American economies before the 1930s, the apparent consumption of energy is used in this paper as a proxy of the degree of modernisation of Latin America and the Caribbean. This paper presents an estimate of the apparent...

We use the recent introduction of biofuels to study the effect of industry factors on the relationships between wholesale commodity prices. Correlations between agricultural products and oil are strongest in the 2005-09 period, coinciding with the boom of biofuels, and remain substantial until...

Why do public-sector workers receive so much of their compensation in the form of pensions and other benefits? This paper presents a political economy model in which politicians compete for taxpayers' and government employees' votes by promising compensation packages, but some voters cannot...

Many of the attributes that make a good "socially responsible" are credence attributes that cannot be learned by consumers either through search or experience. Consumers aggregate information about them from several channels (media, advertisement, NGOs, etc.). Since these sources may send...

The classic theory of fiscal federalism suggests that different people should have different governments. Yet, separate local governments with homogeneous constituents often end up doing poorly. This paper explains why and answers three questions: when regions are heterogeneous, what determines...

In many areas of economics there is a growing interest in how expertise and preferences drive individual and group decision making under uncertainty. Increasingly, we wish to estimate such models to quantify which of these drive decision making. In this paper we propose a new channel through...