Trade and investment liberalization policies put in place in the 1980’s ushered in a new era of globalization and currently form the mainstay of global development policy. However, underdevelopment itself originated in the context of globalization in the 19th century. I first summarize the...

In this paper we study the process of economic growth and convergence in Central America over the period 1960-2000. We specify a dynamic panel data model with fixed effects and evaluate the impact of the factors typically considered in the empirical growth literature, including human capital and...

We estimate a small-scale macro model for the Mexican economy under the New Keynesian framework. We then estimate alternative interest rate rules for Mexico, and use the results from both exercises to evaluate the performance of the Bank of Mexico against a set of optimality principles derived...

This paper identifies one of the main determinants of the dynamics in employment. NAFTA has not benefited substantially the conditions for economic growth and, consequently, the opportunities for new employment. Contrary to expectations, the analysis reveals lower importance for manufacturing in...

In Mexico, as in most Latin American countries with indigenous populations, it is commonly believed that European phenotypes are preferred to mestizo or indigenous phenotypes. However, it is hard to test for such racial biases in the labor market using official statistics since race can only be...

We analyze the impact of local banking infrastructure on manufacturing growth in Mexican municipalities and US counties. We find that aggregate local banking deposits have a positive and significant impact on technological change, and on the use of human capital at the municipal or county level...

This paper uses structural vector autoregressions (SVAR) to characterize the dynamic impact of fiscal policy on national saving. SVAR´s have extensively been used to characterize the impact of monetary policy on the economy but have not been applied as much to analyzing fiscal policy. This...

We explore the relationship between migration and the economic characteristics of Mexican states. Employment deficits might encourage migration, in accordance with the neoclassical modernization principle. However, the results indicate that in spite of the expected benefits of liberalization,...

This paper develops a model of evolution of beliefs through communication in an exogenous social network. We assume that the agents are Bayesian updaters and that the network enables them to listen to the opinion of others about some uncertain parameter of interest. We explore the effects of the...

We propose a merchant-regulatory framework to promote investment in the European natural-gas network infrastructure based on a price cap over two-part tariffs. As suggested by Vogelsang (2001) and Hogan et al., (2010), a profit maximizing network operator (NO) facing this regulatory constraint...