We construct an index theorem for smooth infinite economies that shows that generically the number of equilibria is odd. As a corollary, this gives a new proof of existence and gives conditions that guarantee global uniqueness of equilibria.

Financial advisors typically recommend that a long-term investor should hold a higher percentage of his wealth in stocks than a short-term investor. However, part of the academic literature disagrees with this advice. We use a spatial dominance test which is suited for comparing alternative...

We present a model of imperfect price competition where not all firms can sell to all consumers. A network structure models the local interaction of firms and consumers. We find that aggregate surplus is maximized with a fully connected network, which corresponds to perfect competition, and...

I review a contemporary branch of the informal sector literature that focus on understanding the way firm behavior is affected by the presence of informality and how such distortions have an impact on aggregate variables. The authors in this group all make use of dynamic general equilibrium...

We present evidence on the impact on students' math and reading scores of one of the largest deployments of an OLPC program and the only one implemented at a national scale: Plan Ceibal in Uruguay. We have unique data that allow us to know the exact date of laptop delivery for every student in...

For over five decades, diffusion indexes have been widely used by statistical and economic agencies as an instrument to summarize the dynamics of a group of disaggregated time-series economic data. In this note we revise the methods for constructing diffusion indexes, propose a novel generalized...

We construct a panel data at the state level in Mexico for the years 2006, 2008 and 2011 in order to investigate the impact that entry deregulation efforts have on the cost of opening new businesses in Mexico, where this cost is taken from the Doing Business in Mexico report of the World Bank....

How is the size of the informal sector affected when the distribution of social expenditures across formal and informal workers changes? Given this distribution, how is it affected when the generosity of these transfers changes? We use a search frictions model with informality, (ex post)...

A credit default swap (CDS) is a financial contract in which the holder of the instrument will be compensated in the event of a loan default. When available, CDS's are used to monitor the credit risk of countries and companies. In this work we develop a closed form procedure to value a CDS in...

A barrier option is a financial derivative which includes an activation (or deactivation) clause within a standard vanilla option. For instance, a copper mining company could secure to sell in at least K dollars each ton of copper during the next year, by buying M European put options. However,...