We are first paper to study the economic effects of drug-trafficking organization violence. We exploit the manyfold increase in homicides in 2008-2011 in Mexico resulting from its war on organized drug traffickers to estimate the effect of drug-related homicides on house prices. We use an...

This paper exploits the discrete change in air pollutants induced by the installation of small-scale power plants throughout Mexico to measure the causal relationship between air pollution and infant mortality, and if this relationship varies by municipaly´s socio-economic conditions. The...

The schooling repayment hypothesis for private transfers predicts a positive relationship between the amount of parental investment in childrens education and the amount that adult children transfer to their parents. This paper provides evidence on the repayment motive using data from the...

This paper analyzes the impact of income tax policy on household labor supply through two key life-cycle choices: education and marriage/divorce. To this end, I construct a quantitative life-cycle model to study the effects of changes in the degree of tax progressivity and in the unit of...

We analyze existence of divergent equilibria in a model of endogenous party platforms with stochastic membership, while the membership depends bothon the proposals of the parties and the unobserved idiosyncratic preferecnces of citizens over parties. It is shown that when citizens view the...

We study the relation between credit conditions, misallocation of resources, and total factor productivity (TFP) using sectoral data from Mexican manufacturing industries between 2003 and 2010. Our analysis uses a theory-based framework to account for TFP changes in the Mexican manufacturing...

We consider a committee with common interests. Committee members do not know which of two alternatives is the best, but each member may acquire privately a costly signal before casting a vote under either majority or unanimity rule. In the lab, as predicted by Bayesian equilibrium, voters are...

We study the effciency and fairness properties of the equal cost sharing mechanism in the provision of a binary and excludable public good. According to the maximal welfare loss criterion, equal cost sharing is optimal within the class of strategyproof, individually rational and no-budgetde…cit...

We study a class of boundedly rational choice functions, namely two-stage choosers, which operate as follows. The decision maker uses two criteria in two stages to make a choice. First she shortlists the top-2 alternatives, i.e. two ?nalists, according to one criterion. Next, she chooses the...

We study the impact on the size of the informal sector of a tax levied on formal workers, and transfers that may be distributed to both formal and informal workers alike. We build a search model that features an informal sector and we calibrate it to data from Mexico. We investigate whether...