The costs of import substitution (IS) as a strategy for industrialization, which was deemed synonymous with economic development by many development economists of the fifties and sixties, were shown to be substantial in the influential and nuanced studies of the seventies and eighties under the...

With the growing recognition of the role played by geography in all sorts of economic problems, there is strong interest in measuring the size and scope of local spillovers (i.e., simple anonymous agglomeration or congestion effects, or more complicated interactions between individuals or firms...

Economic explanations for the fertility transition focus on the role of returns to schooling, especially for women, which have encouraged women to obtain more education and facilitated the rise in women's wages relative to men's. The private opportunity costs of children have therefore...

It has become increasingly common to allocate highway franchises to the bidder that offers to charge the lowest toll. Often, building a highway increases the value of land held by a small group of developers, an effect that is more pronounced with lower tolls. We study the welfare implications...

In most instances, the dynamic response of monetary and other policies to shocks is infrequent and lumpy. The same holds for the microeconomic response of some of the most important economic variables, such as investment, labor demand, and prices. We show that the standard practice of estimating...

This paper builds a general test of contagion in financial markets based on bivariate correlation analysis - a test that can be interpreted as an extension of the normal correlation theorem. Contagion is defined as a structural break in the data generating process of rates of return. Using a...

This paper examines the political economy of coordination in a simple two-sector model in which individuals' choice of agricultural technology affects industrialization. We demonstrate the existence of multiple equilibria; the economy is either characterized by the use of a traditional...

We study the interaction of fiscal and monetary policies during a currency crisis in an economy with government nominal liabilities. We show that the stock and maturity of these liabilities are key determinants of the magnitude, timing and predictability of a devaluation. Among notable features...