This thesis consists of three essays on the understanding of political, social and industrial organization as roots of economic vices such as corruption and virtues such as social capital formation. The first essay is "The Organization of Corruption". We study how corruption between the State...

In this paper we empirically assess bankruptcy as a legal process. We examine a comprehensive reform to corporate bankruptcy law in Mexico, which streamlined the legal process and limits on litigation. Then we outline the ways in which bankruptcy law design affect a series of outcome variables....

This paper studies the response of arbitrageurs to adverse price shocks. We focus on short sellers and find that they cover their positions after suffering losses and increase them after experiencing gains. While this relationship is very strong for positions established due to perceived...

We use industrial data to derive estimates of the pattern of change in wage inequality in Mexico and Brazil. Using the group-wise decomposition of Theil's T statistic we present monthly series of measurements of change in the dispersion of industrial wages for Brazil (1976 through 1995) and for...

Industrial data are used to derive estimates of the pattern of change in wage inequality in Mexico and Brazil. Using the group decomposition of Theil's T-statistic, the paper presents monthly changes in the dispersion of industrial wages for Brazil (1976 through 1995) and for Mexico (1968...

For most of Latin America the 1970s were a decade of growth, though with political upheaval in Argentina and Chile. The 1980s were a disaster. The 1990s have seen economic reform, liberalization, a return to democracy and financial turmoil. This study attempts to explain the three decades as one...

In recent work one of us has presented measurements of the evolution of inequality in the U.S. manufacturing sector, from 1920 to 1992. This paper updates and revises those estimates, using a monthly data set for wages and employment of production workers in 18 sectors, for which continuous data...