This paper presents a brief overview of the current state of financial development in Chile, comparing it with other countries. After providing a short summary of the most important financial reforms of past decades, we highlight the main strengths and weaknesses of Chile’s financial markets....

Despite reform efforts, the economic performance of Latin American countries during the 1990s was disappointing with the exception of Chile, which grew at almost 7% per year. This paper tries to explain this difference. Following recent literature that hi

The purpose of this paper is to examine the information contained in the term structure of inflation-linked interest rates in Chile with respect to expected future interest rates. Using the present discounted value methodology developed by Campbell and Ammer (1993), we decompose excess returns...

Technological change has reduced the relative price of capital goods. Reductions in trade costs make it cheaper to import capital goods. With capital-skill complementarity, both can increase the skill premium. I construct a general-equilibrium trade model with capital-skill complementarity to...

Knowledge is key to the success of a firm. Firms and their managers acquire knowledge via channels which are often difficult to track down and quantify. By matching employer-employee data with trade data at the firm level we show that the export experience acquired by managers in previous firms...

Drawing from confidential firm-level balance sheets in 11 European countries, the paper presents a novel sectoral database of comparable productivity indicators built by members of the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) using a newly developed research infrastructure. Beyond aggregate...

The administration of tax policy has shifted its focus from enforcement to complementary instruments aimed at creating a social norm of tax compliance. In this paper we provide an analysis of the effects of the dissemination of information regarding the past degree of tax evasion at the social...

This paper studies the impact of optimism on occupational choice using a general equilibrium framework. The model shows that optimism has four main qualitative effects: it leads to a misallocation of talent, drives up input prices, raises the number of entrepreneurs, and makes entrepreneurs...

The analysis of the effects of firm-level international trade on wages has so far focused on the role of exports, which are also typically treated as a composite good. However, we show in this paper that firm-level imports can actually be a wage determinant as important as exports. Furthermore,...

Understanding why certain jobs are ‘better’ than others and what implications they have for a worker’s career is clearly an important but still relatively unexplored question. We provide both a theoretical frame-work and a number of empirical results that help distinguishing ‘good’...