When President Felipe Calderón took office he declared a war on drug lords, thus initiating a war of attrition which has claimed more than 40,000 lives in the last 5 years. In this paper I document how this escalation of violence has led Mexicans living close to the northern border to migrate...

This paper offers an explanation for the common observation that political incumbents not only frequently win reelection, but often face weak competition or no competition at all when running for reelection. I explain this outcome by modeling the entry decision of potential election candidates...

We develop the trivariate probit model in which the sample incidentally truncates twice —i.e. in the first and in the second equations—, which is not solved in the literature. The model is analogue to the so called Bivariate Probit with Sample Selection (also referred as Bivariate Probit...

This paper presents a small open economy model to study the role of interest rate shocks in an emerging economy like Mexico. The interest rate is decomposed in two terms: an international rate and a country risk premia. First, it is shown that the model is able to explain several stylized facts...

We consider a class of two-player quadratic games under incomplete information to study the relation between exogenous coordination motives and strategic interactions in information acquisition. The players make decisions in two stages. They decide about information acquisition in the first...

This research presents an application of the Hogan, Rosellón and Vogelsang (2010) (HRV) mechanism —that promotes electricity transmission network expansion— in the Peruvian electricity transmission system known as SEIN (Sistema Eléctrico Interconectado Nacional). The HRV mechanism combines...

In Mexico, the electricity sector is one of the most important for the economy. It is a crucial input for the industry. The standard of living of the mexican population depends on the access to electricity. This relevance has generated, since former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo’s proposal...

In this paper we investigate the effects of volatility of the fundamental determinants of trade on trade flows in Mexico during the period 1991-2008. Our import and export functions are based on the well known imperfect substitute goods model of trade. We focus on the effects on imports and...

In this paper we investigate whether the communication bias of the Bank of Mexico provides information that helps to anticipate the course of monetary policy in subsequent periods. We first construct an objective index of the communication bias, based upon an statistical analysis of key terms...

In this paper we investigate empirically the determinants of credit default rates in the Peruvian system of Municipal Banks of Savings and Credit, using a dynamic fixed effects model with monthly data, over the period 2003-2010. We postulate that credit default rates are positively related to...