This paper examines the role of several factors in reducing the production costs of Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, including learning-by-doing (LBD), economies of scale, rising factor prices, market competitiveness, and exogenous technological changes. Using the aggregate industry-level data over...

This exercise estimates the level of competitiveness for the 32 federal states of Mexico taking into account production, productivity, employment and wages in 82 activities representing 95% of total GNP. There are two types of Mexican states in respect of economic performance. The competitive...

Although there exist the conditions and reasons to let Pemex become a trully state owned, commercialy oriented, oil company, in reality Pemex does not behave as such, due to the limitations posed by its legal framework. Such legal framework poses severe limitations to Pemex’s capacity in...

In this paper we analyze a repeated Principal Agent model, formulated as a Multi-Objective Optimization problem. We approximate its Pareto Frontier by using a recently proposed Multi-Objective Optimization Evolutionary Algorithm named RankMOEA. We focus on the effects of changes of productivity...

This paper investigates empirically the relationship between inflation, inflation volatility and output growth in the case of México using monthly data over the period 1993-2011. Specifically a bivariate GARCH-M model is estimated to test the hypotheses that inflation rates are directly related...

When President Felipe Calderón took office he declared a war on drug lords, thus initiating a war of attrition which has claimed more than 40,000 lives in the last 5 years. In this paper I document how this escalation of violence has led Mexicans living close to the northern border to migrate...

This paper offers an explanation for the common observation that political incumbents not only frequently win reelection, but often face weak competition or no competition at all when running for reelection. I explain this outcome by modeling the entry decision of potential election candidates...

We develop the trivariate probit model in which the sample incidentally truncates twice —i.e. in the first and in the second equations—, which is not solved in the literature. The model is analogue to the so called Bivariate Probit with Sample Selection (also referred as Bivariate Probit...

This paper presents a small open economy model to study the role of interest rate shocks in an emerging economy like Mexico. The interest rate is decomposed in two terms: an international rate and a country risk premia. First, it is shown that the model is able to explain several stylized facts...

We consider a class of two-player quadratic games under incomplete information to study the relation between exogenous coordination motives and strategic interactions in information acquisition. The players make decisions in two stages. They decide about information acquisition in the first...