This paper examines the economic effects of employment protection legislation in a sample of developed and developing countries. Implementing a difference-indifferences test lessens the potentially severe endogeneity and omitted variable problems associated with cross-country regressions. This...

This article studies the relationship between creditor protection and credit responses to macroeconomic shocks. Using a data set on legal determinants of finance in a panel of data on aggregate credit growth for 79 countries during 1990--2004, it is shown that credit is more responsive to...

Recent literature has emphasized the importance of transport costs and infrastructure in explaining trade, access to markets, and increases in per capita income. For most Latin American countries, transport costs are a greater barrier to U.S. markets than import tariffs. We investigate the...

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se pone a prueba la eficiencia de diversas estructuras de propiedad de instituciones bancarias, en términos de su capacidad de atender sectores manufactureros específicos que necesitan crédito. Hallamos que los bancos propiedad del...

This paper estimates the elasticity of substitution of U.S. imports using detailed trade data over the 1990-2003 period. The authors use a two-stage least squares framework in order to identify the elasticity parameter of interest. The authors use the elasticity estimates to assess the extent to...

Recent literature has emphasized the importance of transport costs and infrastructure in explaining trade, access to markets, and increases in per capita income. For most Latin American countries transport costs are a greater barrier to U.S. markets than import tariffs. The authors investigate...