The paper examines the applicability of GDP-linked bonds for the financing of developing countries and emerging markets. GDP-linked bonds are bonds of which the coupon and/or redemption payments are tied to the GDP of the issuing country. The study encompasses a detailed empirical analysis of...

The paper focuses in the calculation of the oil capital value in a small open economy depending on oil rents. The Venezuelan case is used as an example. In valuing the oil capital, two issues are recalled and discussed: how should the exploration costs and the capital gains be treated? It is...

Venezuela experienced slow economic growth during the 2000s. The economy suffered a recession in the early years of the period and during the international crisis of 2008, but most labour market indicators improved and moved along with the business cycle over the period. The only indicators that...

How does trade liberalization affect the wage gap between skilled workers and unskilled workers? The Heckscher-Ohlin (HO) trade model gives a prediction about the relation between wages and prices. However, its simple Stolper-Samuelson (SS) and Specific-Factors (SF) versions make opposite...

This paper uses a newly developed panel data set for Venezuela in the period between 1994 and 2002 to analyze three basic questions. the first relates to the influence of personal characteristics and previous labor market experience in the choice of different search methods. The second question...

We identify the effects of the supply of mortgage credit on house prices, using the politicallydirected credit-targeting regime of Venezuela as quasi-natural experiment. We find a large effect of the supply of housing credit on time path of house prices (or housing Markups), with an elasticity...

For over a century, legal scholars have debated the question of what to do about the debts incurred by despotic governments; asking whether successor non-despotic governments should have to pay them. That debate has gone nowhere. This paper examines whether an Op Ed written by Harvard economist,...