This paper evaluates the effectiveness of easing credit constraints for rural producers in Mexico through loans provided by a national public development finance institution (DFI). In contrast to most of the existing literature, the study focuses on the effect of medium-sized loans over a two-...

This paper examines the role of institutions (including civil law origin), financial deepening and degree of regime authority on growth rates in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region using panel data through a fixed effect model. The results reveal that English civil law origin and the...

We provide a methodology to study the role of market distortions on the emergence of indeterminacy and bifurcations. Most of the specific market imperfections considered in the related literature are particular cases of our framework. Comparing them we obtain several equivalence results in terms...

We study the impact of intra-industry trade and capital mobility on steady state welfare and on the stability properties of two countries with identical technologies and preferences. We consider a two-factor overlapping generations model, featuring one-sector of differentiated goods with taste...

This paper tracks the consequences of individuals' desire to align their location with their social preferences. The social preference studied in the paper is distaste for relative deprivation, measured in a cardinal manner. Location is conceived as social space, with individuals choosing to...

We model an environment in which individuals prefer to be in a space in which their rank is higher, be it a social space, a geographical space, a work environment, or any other comparison sphere which we refer to in this paper, and without loss of generality, as a region. When the individuals...

We investigate the causal impact of equity market liberalizations in the period 1980-1997 on sectoral export performance across 91 countries. The increased availability of external finance has boosted trade of industries that intensively use relationship-specific inputs, and lowered exports of...

We use a unique dataset to estimate the impact of a large credit supply shock on employment in Spain. We exploit marked differences in banks' health at the onset of the Great Recession. Several weak banks were rescued by the State and they reduced credit more than other banks. We compare...

In this article we study the resilience of the Portuguese labor market, in terms of job flows, employment and wage developments, in the context of the current recession. We single out the huge contribution of job destruction, especially due to the closing of existing firms, to the dramatic...

This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods...