In the early eighties Chile completely reformed its electricity sector, introducing a regulatory framework that became extremely influential in the rest of the world. In 1998 and 1999, however, when the La Niña phenomenon brought one of the worst droughts on record, the price system collapsed....

En este trabajo estimamos la demanda residencial por energía eléctrica con un panel de 18 distribuidoras de electricidad con datos mensuales entre enero de 1995 y diciembre de 2001.  La elasticidad—precio de la demanda residencial por energía eléctrica es -0 ,0548 en un mes y -0 ,39 en el...

Roads are being franchised to private firms in many countries, raising the issue of regulating the tolls they charge. When there is more than one road to get from one point to another, regulation need not be necessary, since competition may substitute for toll regulation. This paper studies toll...

This paper reviews the Latin American experience with highway privatization during the last decade. Based on evidence from Argentina, Colombia and Chile, we find that private financing of new highways freed up fewer public resources than expected because public funds were often diverted to bail...

Esta nota estudia los determinantes de la tasa apropiada para fijar peajes de transmisión. Para ello se desarrolla un modelo simple que permite descomponerla en una suma de la tasa libre de riesgo y el premio por riesgo. Los principios generales son dos: (a) la tasa debiera ser variable y...

We review the experience of both private toll-roads built in the United States during the 1990s, and argue that the problems they encountered could have been avoided if the length of the franchise contract would adapt to demand realizations. We also argue in favor of adjudicating private...

This note is a brief introduction to the strategic theory of inflation initiated by Barro and Gordon (1983a). The discussion is organized around the question of which are the causes of inflation according to the strategic theory. I show that the answer depends on whether the Central Bank can...

We study the determinants of market structure in financial intermediation markets when property rights over information are weak. We show that incentives to gather information to screen firms can be preserved in decentralized markets with more than one intermediary. Local monopoly power is...

In this paper we study the heterodox stabilization plans of Argentina 1985 (Plan Austral) and Brazil 1986 (Plan Cruzado). Both plans considered that the main cause of inflation was inertia, due to indexation of wages, exchange rates and financial instrume