Many of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's appearances on the world stage can rightly be called provocations. His verbal radicalism and regular threats to cease supplying oil to the United States make international headlines. But his rhetorical gestures cannot be dismissed as the megalomania of...

Policy responses to COVID-19 affected the dynamic of economic growth and labor markets worldwide, hitting economically harder on developing countries. These policies involved economic lockdowns that included the shutdown of the main statistical exercises, making it almost impossible to assess...

In this paper, the time-frequency dependency of political risk as well as economic and financial risks is explored in Venezuela using quarterly data from 1984Q1 to 2018Q4. The present study uses the wavelet coherence technique, which allows the investigation of both the long and short-term...

This paper uses a model of intergenerational accounting to simulate the intergenerational distribution of oil wealth in Venezuela. Venezuelan oil production does not seem to follow an optimal extraction path. Nevertheless, this is true if we do not consider what the government does with the...

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...

This paper assesses labor market segmentation across formal and informal salaried jobs and self-employment in three Latin American and three transition countries. It looks separately at the markets for skilled and unskilled labor, inquiring if segmentation is an exclusive feature of the latter....

This paper investigates the demand for broad money in Venezuela, over a period of financial crisis and substantial exchange rate fluctuations. The analysis shows that there exist a long run relationship between real money, real income, inflation, the exchange rate and the domestic interest rate,...

To determine whether the real exchange rate is misaligned with respect to its long-run equilibrium is an important issue for policy makers. This paper clarifies and calculates the concept of the equilibrium real exchange rate, using a structural vector autoregression (VAR) model. By imposing...

Causal mechanisms and related contextual variables are crucial to the study of the resource-conflict link, but little systematic research has been done on their exact functioning. This paper contributes to the filling of this gap by comparing four major oil exporters (Algeria, Iran, Nigeria, and...

Neopatrimonialism is a concept that has predominately been applied to describe governance in sub-Saharan Africa. Recently, though, it has also been used to describe states from other world regions. However, scholars have rarely attempted to systematically compare neopatrimonial rule in different...