This paper documents a positive relation between bank competition and the penetration of bank accounts at the municipal level in Mexico. To account for potential biases in our regressions due to the endogeneity of market structure, we employ a two-stage estimation approach based on an...

The focus of this paper is to analyze the effect that ambiguity will have on the buyer's reservation price and the value of the option to purchase the durable good with an embedded option to resell it. The agent is assumed to be risk neutral and ambiguity averse. The problem is formulated as an...

In this paper we examine some economic factors that have influenced migration flows from Mexico to the United States since 1990 for the purpose of constructing scenarios on how such flows could evolve in the near term. In particular, we link the behavior of migration to changes in sectoral...

In this paper, we study various key structural features of sugarcane production and sugar mills in Mexico. Regarding the production of sugarcane: (a) we document a U-shaped relationship between the size of sugarcane cultivation plots and their yield, and show suggestive evidence that this...

I study the diffusion process of permanent disinflationary shocks in the Mexican economy using disaggregated price data for 283 goods across 46 cities in the period 1995-2012. I first show that the distribution of shocks shows considerable heterogeneity, with more than 80% of all cases having...

This paper analyzes the effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Mexican manufacturing price cost margins (PCMs) for the period 1994-2003. Taking into account the sensitivity of each industry to the speed of the tariff reductions under NAFTA, the results show that PCMs...

In 2007, seeking to increase female labor force participation and more generally ease burdens on working women, the Mexican government introduced an enormous expansion of a child care program: Estancias Infantiles para Apoyar a Madres Trabajadoras (EI). EI covers 90 percent approximately of the...

This paper provides a description of some of the empirical regularities for the Mexican business cycle. The purpose is to have a benchmark for assessing dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models for the Mexican case. We follow the Kydland and Prescott methodology to describe the cyclical...

The volatility accuracy of several volatility forecast models is examined for the case of daily spot returns for the Mexican peso - US Dollar exchange rate. The models applied are univariate GARCH, a multi-variate GARCH (the BEKK model), option implied volatilities, and a composite forecast...

Emerging economies tend to experience larger political uncertainty and more default episodes than developed countries. This paper studies the effect of political uncertainty on sovereign default and interest rate spreads in emerging markets. The paper develops a quantitative model of sovereign...