This paper seeks to shed light on how manufacturing job flows and productivity in Argentina were affected during the 1990s by economic reforms in general and particularly by: a) financial shocks, b) labor reforms that change non-wage labor costs, c) trade reforms that alter tariff dispersion, d)...

Recent research shows that observed labor market flows can be explained in search and matching models only by assuming either implausibly large productivity shocks (Hall 2003) or an excessively high degree of real wage rigidity even for new hires (Shimer 2003). If this is not the case, the...

This paper examines the empirical relation between employment protection regulation and gross job flows in a sample of developed and developing countries. By implementing a difference in difference test we avoid the potentially severe endogeneity and omitted variable problems associated with...

This paper contributes to the literature comparing the relative performance of financial intermediaries and markets by studying an environment in which a trade-off between risk sharing and growth arises endogenously. Financial intermediaries provide insurance to households against a liquidity...

This paper examines the welfare of consumers in an incomplete markets economy with extrinsic uncertainty. It is shown that the utility of one consumer may be minimized at the Walrasian allocation relative to all other equilibrium allocations for a given security structure. Thus, this consumer...

Firms in poor countries often tend to rely on alternative sources of financing different than banks. We show that borrowing constraints lead to financial arrangements between firms that can amplify the effect of liquidity or productivity shocks in the economy. In particular, we focus on the...

This paper analyses the impact of access to health care and economic conditions on health outcomes. Fixed-effects models are estimated using municipality data from 1996 to 2002. Health is proxied by total mortality rates divided into three different causes of death. Access to health care is...

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between job mobility and wage mobility. One of the main points of this paper is that job mobility is not necessarily bad. Job mobility might be the quickest way in which workers can advance in their careers and move up in the wage structure....

In this paper we analyze the dynamics of labor markets in Chile. Our goal is to understand how flexibility in the labor market has changed over time, and in particular, to relate this change with the legislation framework. We analyze mobility in four different periods, each of them associated...

We develop and test a model of the patenting and R&D decisions of an innovating firm whose scientist-employees sometime quit to join or start a rival. In our model, the innovating firm patents to protect itself from its employees. We show theoretically that the risk of a scientist's departure...