This paper compares the cost of electricity generation with a coal fired plant and a wind mill in Chile’s Central Interconnected System. To the standard costs of coal generation (capital investment and fuel) we add local and global environmental externalities. The environmental cost of...

Energy policy makers usually ignore the response of the demand for electricity to changing prices because they believe that the price elasticity is nil. We show that a “small” price elasticity of demand generates “large” changes in energy shortage probabilities and generation costs when...

SMEs pay more for credits than large firms, their loans tend to be granted against collateral and on short repayment terms, and many are redlined. These practices have usually been interpreted as financial-market imperfections that discriminate against SMEs. We argue that they are responses to...

This paper quantifies the direct impact of taxes on income distribution at the household level in Chile and estimates the distributional effect of several changes in the tax structure. We find that income distributions before and after taxes are very similar (Gini coefficients of 0.488 and...