This paper develops simple guidelines for fiscal policy in oil producing countries, focusing on three issues: intergenerational oil distribution, precautionary saving, and adjustment costs. The paper presents a framework to analyze how the revenue generated by an exhaustible source of wealth...

We explore the role of fiscal policy over the business cycle from a normative perspective, for a government with a highly volatile and exogenous revenue source. Instead of resorting to Keynesian mechanisms, in our framework fiscal policy plays a role because the government provides transfers to...

This paper discusses privatization among investments in infrastructure. The goal of this paper is to present a new auction mechanism that solves many of the problems that have hindered the use of franchises. The first section of the paper discusses least present value of revenue (LPVR) auctions,...

We characterize the degree of microeconomic inflexibility in several Latin American economies and find that Brazil, Chile and Colombia are more flexible than Mexico and Venezuela. The difference in flexibility among these economies is mainly explained by the behavior of large establishments,...

The estimated persistence of macro aggregates involving lumpy microeconomic adjustment is biased downward when inferred from VAR estimates. The extent of this "missing persistence bias" decreases with the level of aggregation, yet convergence is very slow. Paradoxically, while idiosyncratic...