(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) La importancia de los costos del transporte ha venido aumentando a medida que la apertura económica continúa reduciendo las barreras artificiales al comercio internacional. Los países necesitan adoptar políticas que les permitan `acercarse` a los...

En este trabajo se analizan los efectos económicos de la legislación de protección del empleo en una muestra de países industrializados y en desarrollo. Los análisis indican que una legislación más estricta desacelera considerablemente la rotación de puestos de trabajo y que este efecto...

In recent years, Latin American banking sectors have experienced an accelerated process of concentration and foreign penetration that has prompted diverse views regarding its implications for the competitive behavior of banks and for the financial stability of the system as a whole. Exploiting a...

According to recent research, external factors and political governance considerations are key determinants of capital flows in Latin America. We postulate that corporate governance is a crucial determinant as well. We show that while the region is characterized by relatively low levels of...

We study price competition in a model with differentiated products and searching costs. In this model firms charge a price above marginal costs. This positive mark-up gives firms incentive to steal consumers from their rivals. For this purpose, firms hire sales agents that contact customers...

This paper checks whether state-ownership of banks is correlated with lending behavior over the business cycle and finds that their lending is less responsive to macroeconomic shocks than the lending of private banks.

This paper uses an unbalanced panel covering ninety-three countries over the 1990-2002 period to study the empirical relationship between bank concentration and credit volatility. The paper finds that there is a strong negative relationship between loans concentration and credit sensitivity to...

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,...