Mexico is a highly centralized federation. The states and municipalities are highly dependent on federal transfers and so equally at risk to the country’s fiscal dependence on oil. Although Mexico has become more truly federal since multiparty competition has become vibrant and several states...

This paper uses the methodology of Parry and Small (2005) to estimate the optimal gasoline tax for a less-developed, oil-producing country. The relevance of the estimation relies on the differences between less-developed countries LDCs and industrial countries. We argue that lawless roads,...

By introducing a delay differential equation into a population model this paper attempts to show that an update on Malthus’s principle of population requires using new mathematical analyses involving oscillations around a stable attractor. Acceptance of the fact that Malthusian dynamic...

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...