Efforts at fiscal consolidation are often limited because of concerns over potential social unrest. From German austerity measures during the 1930s to the violent demonstrations in Greece in 2010, hard times have tended to go hand in hand with antigovernment violence. In this paper, I assemble...

This paper explores the virtues of Markov-Switching models to characterize the behavior of copper price. In particular, we study the performance of several univariate specifications of this type of models, both in and out of sample, comparing them also with constant parameter models such as ARMA...

Attending college is thought of as a very profitable investment decision, as its estimated annualized return ranges from 8% to 13%. However, a large fraction of high school graduates do not enroll in college. I reconcile the observed high average returns to schooling with relatively low...

Inference about predictive ability is usually carried out in the form of pairwise comparisons between two competing forecasting methods. Nevertheless, some interesting questions are concerned with families of models and not just with a couple of forecasting strategies. An example of this would...

This paper analyzes recent fiscal policies of nonrenewable resource exporting countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in the context of sharp swings in resource prices. Fiscal policies were predominantly procyclical during the boom period 2003-08 but to significantly differing degrees...

Credit and market risks are crucial for financial institutions. In this paper we present the model used by the Central Bank of Chile to conduct the stress tests for commercial banks in Chile. Market risk uses a balance-sheet approach that is consistent with the credit risk. For exchange rate...

The paper presents a detailed description of the evolution of non-copper exports in the 1990-2007 period and decomposes its evolution in terms of the intensive and extensive margins. I document a significant export diversification in terms of markets and products. In the product dimension,...

According to conventional wisdom, fiscal policy is more effective under a fixed exchange rate regime than under a flexible one. In this paper we reconsider the transmission of shocks to government spending across these regimes within a standard new-Keynesian model of a small open economy....

In this paper we study the optimal monetary and fiscal policy mix in a model in which agents are subject to idiosyncratic uninsurable shocks to their labor productivity. We identify two main effects of anticipated inflation absent in representative agent frameworks. First, inflation stimulates...

In this paper we use a new database of scanner-level prices for the Chilean economy to characterize the microeconomic behavior of prices during a period of high inflation. We are able to characterize the price-setting behavior by supermarket chain. The evidence indicates that there is...