This paper presents estimations of the shadow economies for 162 countries, including developing Eastern European, Central Asian, and high-income countries over the period 1999 to 2006/2007. According to the estimations, the average size of the shadow economy (as a percentage of "official" gross...

In this paper we prove a general version of the Second Welfare Theorem for a non-convex and non-transitive economy, with public goods and other externalities in consumption. For this purpose we use the sub-gradient to the distance function (normal cone) to define the pricing rule in this general...

In 1996, the Chilean government approved the extension of the school day, increasing the amount of time that students spend at school by 30%. Using data from the Chilean socio- economic household survey and administrative data from the Ministry of Education for 1990- 2006, we exploit the...

In this paper we consider an exchange economy where there is an external restriction for the consumption of goods. This restriction is defined by both a cap on consumption of certain commodities and the requirement of an amount of rights for the consumption of these commodities. The caps for...

T.W. Schultz (1975) proposed that returns to human capital were highest in economic environments where technology, price or production shocks were common and managerial skills to adapt resource allocations to those shocks were most in need. We hypothesize that variation in returns to human...

We estimate the “place premium”—the wage gain that accrues to foreign workers who arrive to work in the United States. First, we estimate the predicted, purchasing-power adjusted wages of people inside and outside the United States who are otherwise observably identical—with the same...

We set up a model where two retailers compete downstream and buy their inputs from a single producer. Retailers may collude downstream, when fixing the retail price and cooperate upstream by jointly negotiating the wholesale price with the producer. We find that purchase cooperation renders...

Using a randomized controlled trial of a large-scale publicly run micro-entrepreneurship program in Chile, we assess the effectiveness of business training and asset transfers on individuals’ employment and income. About half of the participants had not yet started their businesses at...

This paper reviews industrial policy in Latin America from the Great Depression to our days. Its purpose is to derive some lessons for what Latin American and Caribbean countries (LAC) should do in this area. It has become clear over the last few years that LAC, if they are to accelerate their...