An intertemporal general equilibrium model is used to examine infrastructure effects on the Mexican national income. Production functions are estimated for the major sectors of the economy in which sectoral output depends on inputs of capital and labor, as well as the stocks of the public...

This paper offers an assessment of the methodologies employed to estimate the economic opportunity cost of capital for public sector projects, relying on the Mexican case for an applied empirical exercise. The traditional weighted cost of capital (top-down) approach used in the estimation of...

This paper looks at the empirical record whether big infrastructure and public capital drives have succeeded in accelerating economic growth in low-income countries. It looks at big long-lasting drives in public capital spending, as these were arguably clear and exogenous policy decisions. On...

In this paper we analyze the rationality that sustains the public investments on white elephants applied to the construction of tourist facilities in Mexico. The main result of this paper is that there exist two kinds of rationalities in the construction of white elephants. One is a similar...

Mexican economic historiography recognizes the key role that public investment played in the country's economic performance from the post-revolutionary period until the beginning of the economic liberalization that began in the mid-1980s. However, there is no concrete empirical evidence that...

This paper combines local election results and geo-referenced road construction data over 1993-2012 to investigate political bias in road infrastructure investment in a democratic setting, focusing on the case of Mexico. Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper finds strong evidence of...