During the last years Chile has experienced a great expansion in access to household credit. This has led to important increases of indebtedness, in particular by the poorest income quintile. In this paper we analyze the evolution and the determinants of debt and over-indebtedness in last...

With the objective of evaluating the impact of oil price shocks on the Chilean economy, this paper applies the sign restriction methodology to impulse-response functions in order to distinguish the effects of different types of shocks, namely supply, demand, or oil-specific demand. It also...

Efforts at fiscal consolidation are often limited because of concerns over potential social unrest. From German austerity measures during the 1930s to the violent demonstrations in Greece in 2010, hard times have tended to go hand in hand with antigovernment violence. In this paper, I assemble...

This paper explores the virtues of Markov-Switching models to characterize the behavior of copper price. In particular, we study the performance of several univariate specifications of this type of models, both in and out of sample, comparing them also with constant parameter models such as ARMA...

Attending college is thought of as a very profitable investment decision, as its estimated annualized return ranges from 8% to 13%. However, a large fraction of high school graduates do not enroll in college. I reconcile the observed high average returns to schooling with relatively low...

Inference about predictive ability is usually carried out in the form of pairwise comparisons between two competing forecasting methods. Nevertheless, some interesting questions are concerned with families of models and not just with a couple of forecasting strategies. An example of this would...

This paper analyzes recent fiscal policies of nonrenewable resource exporting countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in the context of sharp swings in resource prices. Fiscal policies were predominantly procyclical during the boom period 2003-08 but to significantly differing degrees...

Credit and market risks are crucial for financial institutions. In this paper we present the model used by the Central Bank of Chile to conduct the stress tests for commercial banks in Chile. Market risk uses a balance-sheet approach that is consistent with the credit risk. For exchange rate...

The paper presents a detailed description of the evolution of non-copper exports in the 1990-2007 period and decomposes its evolution in terms of the intensive and extensive margins. I document a significant export diversification in terms of markets and products. In the product dimension,...