This study aims to assess the social efficiency of microfinance institutions (MFIs) —regulated and non-regulated— in Peru. Social efficiency is referred to the capacity of MFIs to produce more social outputs —number of poor clients and women served— without using more resources. The Data...

To assess the employment effects of labor costs it is crucial to have reliable estimates of the labor cost elasticity of labor demand. Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we estimate a long run unconditional labor demand function, exploiting information on workers to correct for endogeneity in...

This essay is concerned with the performance of Peruvian manufacturing industry and manufacturing trade, during the 1950-1996 period. This period comprehends the years of import substitution industrialization, the long economic stagnation of 1976-1990, and the recent years of trade...

This paper is concerned with competition in the peruvian manufacturing industry. A simple model of competition is estimated in order to evaluate the influence of productivity changes and relative labor costs. With this purpose an index of competition was constructed for 32 industrial branches,...

This essay pretends to show, on the one hand, that the gains of competition are concentrated only on industrial branches with statistically significant increasing returns to scale and, on the other hand, that the significance of intra-industrial trade has been reduced during the last years. The...

The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate empirically the economic relation between Lima and some departments of the country by estimating the effect of shocks affecting Lima's growth over the rates of growth of the remaining departments. We do not pretend to describe the mechanisms of...

In recent years we are observing a process of strengthening of private property rights and an increasing role for contracts in economic relations. The rising importance of the contract in contrast to that of law implies the privatization of power relations, the growing marginality of the...

What kind of forces concentrate industry in the biggest cities? First, using Krugman’s model we illustrate the impact of transport costs in the decision to install a plant in a relatively small city. Then, we introduce the impact of productivity to show that productivity differences would have...

We first use the Scottish debate to show a non-Ricardian way of approaching the problem of inter-national economic relations distinguishing between the effects of an once-and-for-all opening of previously closed markets and a long-term process of interaction including technical change, relative...