In recent years the program evaluation methods have become very popular in applied microeconomics. However, the variety of these methods responds to specific problems, which are normally determined by the data available and the impact the researcher tries to measure. This paper summarizes the...

I use three non-linear econometric models to identify and analyze business cycles in the Peruvian economy for the period 1980:1-2008:4. The models are the Smooth Transition Autoregressive (STAR) model suggested by Teräsvirta (1994), the extended version of the Markov-Switching model proposed by...

This paper addresses an ongoing debate on significant concepts about morality in public and even private life, and their relationships with economist. It entails a concern of several scholars (more permanent for some of them and more circumstantial for others), and attempts to get a precise view...

Under what circumstances does collective action arise? What contributes to the likelihood that a particular collective initiative will succeed? To what extent are poor communities capable of organizing themselves to improve their quality of life? These questions are not new, and economic...

The objective of this work is to analyze the existing relation between employment, unemployment and production, by means of the estimation of the Okun coefficient for the Peruvian Economy. A previous step consists in the estimation of the employment-production elasticity. Both parameters are...

The current fiscal policy does not differentiate capital expenditure from current expenditure. Since the global deficit target is fixed according to the present fiscal policy rule, the non financial expenditure becomes pro cyclical, and the public investment is adjusted to meet the targeted...

To assess the employment effects of labor costs it is crucial to have reliable estimates of the labor cost elasticity of labor demand. Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we estimate a long run unconditional labor demand function, exploiting information on workers to correct for endogeneity in...

This paper estimates the impact of preferential trade arrangements (PTAs) on relative prices and supplied quantity of a representative nontradable agricultural product, Maiz Amilaceo, produced in the four poorest regions of Peru, located in the Sierra Sur for the period 1971-2005. Two key...

Informality not only represents a very significant proportion of the workforce. Informal production units are also widespread as 90% of entrepreneurs of the production units identified with the household surveys are not registered. They absorb a significant proportion of the workforce but only...

This paper presents in a simple way and using figures the partial economic analysis of how the market works. Under the normative analysis, using the Pareto efficiency concept, a series of the so called market failures or distortions are defined. Under, the positive analysis the effects of these...