This paper study the effects of two-part tariff pricing in a competitive environment with differentiated products and switching costs. This is the case of long distance telephone service, where there is a fixed monthly fee and a charge per call. This is also the case for some financial...

Optimal stabilization policy is counter-cyclical, aiming at keeping output close to its potential. However it has been traditionally argued that emerging economies are unable to adopt counter-cyclical monetary and fiscal policy. Here we argue that the cyclical properties of macroeconomic...

This paper presents micro evidence on the degree of downward nominal wage rigidity in Chile and also explores its consequences in terms of employment. The data used corresponds to a new panel based on 440 thousand wage histories for the period 2001.12-2007.12. The results indicate a low degree...

World Trade has experienced an increased integration over the last 15 years. More than half of world trade currently takes place under actual or future trading blocks. Our main goal is to test whether free trade or regional integration agreements (FTA or RIA, respectively) have strengthened the...

This paper examines the empirical behavior of monthly secondary spreads from eighteen emerging market economies located in Asia, East Europe and Latin America from October 1997 to September 2002, a particularly turbulent period. A succession of events affected these economies such as the Asian...

This paper employs the Geweke decomposition test on pooled data of 109 developing and industrial countries from 1960 to 1994 to examine the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth. The paper finds that (1) financial development generally leads to economic growth;...

This paper provides the second order bias for the Symmetrically Normalized Instrumental Variable Estimator (SNIV), using Edgeworth expansions for both the estimator and the minimum eigenvalue. SNIV was proposed by Alonso-Borrego and Arellano (1999) as an alternative for the Limited Information...

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of external vulnerability using panel data methods for a worldwide sample of countries. Controlling for domestic conditions, the paper examines the growth volatility effects of outcome measures of trade and financial openness as well as four types of...

This paper analyzes Latin America’s recent experience with the use of inflation targeting (IT) while the region has made substantial progress toward eradicating high inflation. The paper assesses the implementation and results of inflation targeting in Latin America from a broad perspective....

This paper uses genetic algorithms (GAs) to find the optimal parameter values in the solution of the Real Business Cycle model. To generate the policy functions of the individual, we approximate the conditional expectation of the Euler equation using an exponential polynomial function, based on...