COVID-19 became a global health emergency when it threatened the catastrophic collapse of health systems as demand for health goods and services and their relative prices surged. Governments responded with lockdowns and increases in transfers. Empirical evidence shows that lockdowns and...

This article tests the existence of credit constraints on higher education access by estimating actual marginal returns in the context of unobserved heterogeneity. We estimate higher education returns for those who attend to it and compare them with those of individuals who are at the margin of...

In several countries governments fund childcare provision, but in many others it is privately funded as labour regulation mandates that firms have to provide childcare services. For this latter case, there is no empirical evidence on the effects generated by the financial burden of childcare...

This paper analyzes the impact of student loans for higher education on enrollment, dropout decisions, and earnings. We investigate the massive State Guaranteed Loan (SGL) program implemented in Chile in 2006. Our empirical analysis is based on the estimation of a sequential schooling decision...

Our findings show that the SGL program increased the probability of enrollment and reduced the probability of dropping out from tertiary education: SGL reduced the first year dropout rate by 6.8% for students enrolled in five-year colleges and by 64.3% for those enrolled in institutions offering...

In the classical literature of innovation-based endogenous growth, the main engine of long run economic growth is firm entry. Nevertheless, when projects are heterogeneous, and good ideas are scarce, a mass-composition trade off is introduced into this link: larger cohorts are characterized by a...

We combine the real business cycle small open economy framework with the endogenous growth literature to study the productivity cost of a sudden stop. In this economy, productivity growth is determined by successful implementation of business ideas, yet the quality of ideas is heterogeneous and...

We propose a parsimonious framework for real rigidities, in the form of strategic complementarities, that can generate real and nominal dynamics and match key features of the data across several literatures. Existing menu-cost models featuring strategic complementarities require unrealistically...

Using American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) data, we show that firms lever their political connections to win stimulus grants and that public expenditure channeled through politically connected firms hinders job creation. We build a unique database that links information on campaign...