The focus of this paper is the link between income volatility and the accumulation of human capital in the presence of credit constraints. Also, the effect of income inequality on the accumulation of human capital within the same framework is studied

This paper evaluates the determinants of school attendance and work of rural adolescents between 10 and 18 years old in 1997-1998 for a sample of Latin American countries. Rural adolescents are quite disadvantaged relative to their urban counterparts. The share of rural adolescents studying...

This paper estimates the effects of equipment investment on relative wages and employment of skilled labor and explores their dynamics. The basic hypothesis is that they are positive, due to either equipment-skill complementarity or to skill advantage in technology adoption. Using a panel data...

This paper examines the determinants of illegal immigration in the United States from Mexico from 1976 to 1995. The main challenge in the empirical work is that the observations are not the number of individuals that attempt to enter the United States illegally, but rather the number of...

This paper studies the empirical links among factor endowments, trade, and personal income distribution. The motivation is that many developing countries have implemented radical trade reforms in recent years. These reforms have changed relative prices, induced a reallocation of resources, and...

Models on the composition of trade and growth often assume that the technological content of trade is negatively correlated with the income of the trading partner. First, this paper shows that this assumption is not supported empirically. Second, it presents a Ricardian model with non-homothetic...

This paper presents a test to discriminate among behaviors of producers of exhaustible resources. The behavior of a competitive producer of an exhaustible resource should follow an Euler equation. The existence of futures markets allows us to sidestep the difficult issues related to estimating...

This paper presents a model in which trade is motivated both by preference for variety and comparative advantages. This framework is used to analyze the welfare implications of trading blocs among countries with different endowments with and without transportation costs

Baumol (1967) showed that the rate of growth of an economy slows down if a sector has lower productivity than others and the demand between goods is inelastic. This paper points out that trade is equivalent to technological progress in the tradable sector. Therefore an open economy has higher...