This paper analyzes the effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Mexican manufacturing price cost margins (PCMs) for the period 1994-2003. Taking into account the sensitivity of each industry to the speed of the tariff reductions under NAFTA, the results show that PCMs...

In this paper we investigate how firms adjust markups across products in response to fluctuations in the real exchange rate. In a theoretical framework, we show that firms increase their markup and producer prices following a real depreciation and that this increase is greater for products with...

This paper proposes a new mechanism linking trade and wage inequality in developing countries - the quality-upgrading mechanism - and investigates its empirical implications in panel data on Mexican manufacturing plants. In a model with heterogeneous plants and quality-differentiated goods, only...

This paper uses firm-level data for Mexican exporters to understand how firm-level export decisions shape a country's aggregate exports. The data allows for a characterization of both the crosssectional distribution of Mexican exports, across destinations and across exporting firms, and of the...

This paper applies a structural framework to estimate production function coefficients, obtain firm-level markup estimates, and evaluate the impact of the trade liberalization that took place in Mexico in the period 1984-1990 on the profitability of the firms operating in the domestic market and...

Legal systems provide the basic institutions for firms and markets to operate. Their quality can have important consequences on the size distribution of firms, who rely on them for contract enforcement. This paper uses the variation in legal system quality across states in Mexico to examine the...

We document the existence of asymmetric price transmission in Mexico for a wide variety of food and non-food products, in terms of magnitude and speed, for two segments of the supply chain: i) Producer (producer-wholesale) and ii) Consumer (wholesale-retail). We find that asymmetric price...

Over the last two decades Mexico has had an open trade regime, experienced macroeconomic stability, and made substantial progress in education. However, average workers¿ earnings have stagnated and earnings for workers with more schooling have declined, compressing the earnings distribution and...

The aim of this work is to give a perspective about the utility of the strategic alliances from the view of three theories: The resource-based theory, the industry-based theory and the institutional-based theory. The raised hypotheses were that the strategic alliances are useful to enter to the...

Over the last two decades Mexico has had an open trade regime, experienced macroeconomic stability, and made substantial progress in education. However, average workers' earnings have stagnated and earnings for workers with more schooling have declined, compressing the earnings distribution and...