Recent theories of crisis put lending booms at the root of financial collapses. Yet lending booms may be a natural consequence of economic development and fluctuations. So are lending booms dangerous? In this paper, we investigate empirically this question using a broad sample of lending boom...

Over the last five decades a growing number of governments in developed and developing countries have implemented targeting policies to increase the R&D to GDP ratio. However, until now there have been few attempts either to evaluate the effectiveness of these policy efforts or to identify the...

Using retained profits, instead of realized capital gains, by simply adding them to the shareholders’ other sources of income is shown to be in general incorrect. We provide a methodology to include undistributed profits as part of the income of the top echelons of the distribution.

The Chilean economy is usually highly praised as a successful one since the imposition of neoliberal reforms, under the dictatorship of general Pinochet in 1973. The fact is that the four decades that have elapsed include sub-periods with quite different policy approaches and notably diverse...

This paper shows one important result, namely, that corporate tax systems that allow at least for two sources of investment tax deductions (e.g., accelerated arbitrary investment depreciation and deductibility of part of interest payments on the firm`s debt) can be, under certain plausible...

Rates of return to investments in schooling have been estimated since the late 1950s. In the 60-plus year history of such estimates, there have been several attempts to synthesize the empirical results to ascertain patterns. This paper presents comparable estimates, as well as a database, that...

Using firm-level data from the manufacturing sector of Chile for the period 1995-2002, we examine whether access to finance increase the probability of exporting. To do that, we exploit information of firms’ access to banking debt and changes in the real exchange rate (RER) to identify...