There has been increasing concern that the difficulty of obtaining firm operation licences in developing countries may decrease firm creation and increase informality. We estimate the effect on new firm creation/registration of a program that speeds up firm registration procedures and makes them...

In the mid 1980s, Mexico undertook major trade reform, privatization and deregulation. This coincided with a rapid expansion in wages and employment that led to a rise in wage dispersion. This paper examines the role of industry and occupation-specific effects in explaining the growing...

We postulate that the growing participation of institutional investors in capital markets along with their particular objective function might help to explain the home equity bias puzzle. We model an institutional investor as a risk averse investor that has access to international financial...

We show that a perfect correlated equilibrium distribution of an N-person game, as defined by Dhillon and Mertens (1996) can be achieved using a finite number of copies of the strategy space as the message space.

This paper uses the introduction of an unconditional cash transfer to older adults in Mexico City to test whether the gender of the person who receives money transfers affects household expenditures and children’s school enrollment. We conclude, as most of the existing literature on this topic...

We consider a two-alternative election with voluntary participation and nearly common interests in which voters may acquire information about which alternative is best. Voters may be rational or naive in the sense of being able, or not, to update their beliefs about the state of the world...

This paper explores the relationship between fertility and the introduction of new laws regulating cohabitation, in a context of low fertility and high out of wedlock childbearing. We show that in France, while fertility and marriage rates moved closely together before 1999, since the...

We build a small open economy, real business cycle model with labor market frictions to evaluate the role of employment protection in shaping business cycles in emerging economies. The model features matching frictions and an endogenous selection effect by which inefficient jobs are destroyed in...

We investigate the impact of international trade, in particular import competition, on the environment. We tackle this question from a new perspective, i.e., whether trade liberalization affects production plants' environmental performance by changing incentives of firms to undertake two types...

Financial crises in emerging economies are accompanied by a large fall in total factor productivity. We explore the role of financial frictions in exacerbating the misallocation of resources and explaining this drop in TFP. We build a two-sector model of a small open economy with a working...