I conduct a cross-country analysis of the human development index (HDI) components, income, life expectancy, literacy and gross enrolment ratios, using Gray and Purser’s 1970-2005 quinquennial database for 111 countries. 1) A descriptive analysis uncovers a complex pattern of divergence and...

In this paper we estimate the macroeconomic impact of the 1997 Mexican pension reform, which substituted a pay-as-you-go for a fully- funded system with individual accounts. To analyze the impact of the reform on GDP growth, three main channels are considered: national savings and domestic...

A long term forest fire danger index is described. Such an index is based on the principle that forest fires follow a self organized critical behavior. This behavior implies that under a wide variety of circumstances, forest fires exhibit a power-law dependence of occurrence frequency on burn...

This study estimates the incidence of public monetary and in kind transfers on the income of households with workers earning the minimum wage in Mexico. The study extends and updates a previous study, "Las transferencias públicas en el costo de vida de los hogares con trabajadores de salario...

In this paper, we analyze de market for electricity generation in Mexico through the merit order model. Using data for capacity, load factors, and expected demand for 2004; we carry out a simulation to find the lowest generation cost for the Mexican Electricity System. We find that steam plants...

The paper explores the influences of financial development on economic growth and its volatility. First, it discusses the theoretical literature that attempts to explain these relationships. Then, it presents time series evidence for the cases of Mexico and the US. We use GARCH models, which...

This paper evaluates to what extent the end-of-sample problem inherent to the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter may be ameliorated when estimating the trend component of GDP. For that purpose, the filter of St-Amant and van Norden (1997) is proposed using Mexican data and both univariate and...

We analyze the consequences of a teenage pregnancy event in the short- and long-run in Mexico. Using longitudinal and cross-section data, we match females who got pregnant and those that did not based on a propensity score. Several balancing tests and specifications indicate that the main...

There exists an ongoing debate about the economic impact induced by credit programs, mainly in developing countries. However, it has been less discussed the impact on welfare derived from the ownership of informal or formal credit. In this paper it is studied the impact of credit on the...

Does the rotten apple spoils his companions? This is the question we analyze in the context of a repeated population game with behavioral types. Our experimental results show that the inclusion of a non-cooperative player in an anonymous community makes cooperation much more difficult to sustain...