Publicaciones

Formal training programs are one of the main channels through which workers become more productive and experience wage growth. So far, however, most of the results on the effects of employer-provided training come from studying the training received by private sector workers only. We extend the literature by identifying and comparing the effects of private-employer-provided and public-employer-provided training in the United States and the United Kingdom. We address this question using two independent data sets from the British Household Panels Surveys and the American National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1979. (JEL J24, J31, J40) © 2016 Western Economic Association International.

A regression model is proposed for the analysis of an ordinal response variable depending on a set of multiple covariates containing ordinal and potentially other variables. The proportional odds model (McCullagh in J R Stat Soc Ser B (Methodol) 109–142, 1980) is used for the ordinal response, and constrained maximum likelihood estimation is used to account for the ordinality of covariates. Ordinal predictors are coded by dummy variables. The parameters associated with the categories of the ordinal predictor(s) are constrained, enforcing them to be monotonic (isotonic or antitonic). A decision rule is introduced for classifying the ordinal predictors’ monotonicity directions, also providing information whether observations are compatible with both or no monotonicity direction. In addition, a monotonicity test for the parameters of any ordinal predictor is proposed. The monotonicity constrained model is proposed together with five estimation methods and compared to the unconstrained one based on simulations. The model is applied to real data explaining a 10-points Likert scale quality of life self-assessment variable by ordinal and other predictors. © 2018, The Author(s).

Generally, determining the size and magnitude of the omitted variable bias (OVB) in regression models is challenging when multiple included and omitted variables are present. Here, I describe a convenient OVB formula for treatment effect models with potentially many included and omitted variables. I show that in these circumstances it is simple to infer the direction, and potentially the magnitude, of the bias. In a simple setting, this OVB is based on mutually exclusive binary variables, however I provide an extension which loosens the need for mutual exclusivity of variables, deriving the bias in difference-in-differences style models with an arbitrary number of included and excluded “treatment” indicators. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.

Global games emerged as an approach to equilibrium selection. For a general setting with supermodular payoffs, unique selection of equilibrium has been obtained through iterative elimination of strictly dominated strategies. For the case of global games with strategic substitutes, uniqueness of equilibrium has not been proved by iterative elimination of strictly dominated strategies, making the equilibrium less appealing. In this work we provide a condition for dominance solvability in a simple three-player binary-action global game with strategic substitutes. This opens an unexplored research agenda on the study of global games with strategic substitutes. © 2015 Elsevier B.V.

This paper is about Mapuche sheep raising and woollens production during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, as well as about the perception customers had of Mapuche wool manufactures. Based on the British consular reports and travellers' diaries written after Chile gained independence, this article provides new and stronger evidence to support the case that Mapuche textile production was of high-quality and very important for their entire economy; that the Mapuche woollens trade was comparable to European industries before the 1850s; and that the Mapuche wool industry was certainly more developed than the one existing in Chile, the main market for Mapuche exports. This article also shows that this superiority over the Chilean woollens industry included the production of the main raw material used to produce woollens, namely raw wool.

This paper studies the catching up process of the per capita income of Western European countries for the 1870–2014 period. The contribution to the literature is twofold. First, the use of the Kejriwal and Perron (2010) algorithm allows us to detect any number of structural breaks in the level and in the trend without prior knowledge of the integration order. This is a significant improvement over the algorithms previously used in the literature which limits the number of possible structural breaks to two. In fact, we find that some countries show more than two breaks. Second, we use the longest data series in the literature. That enables us to tell a much richer story about the catching up process in Western Europe. We find that events like the World Wars, the creation of the European Economic Community and the information technology revolution, among others, were likely to cause such breaks. © 2018 The Society for Policy Modeling

Latin America is a region with very high income inequality and low social mobility. It has experienced several stagnation episodes and was plagued, from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, by hyperinflation. This phenomenon took place at different moments in time and with varying intensity. Using a novel data set for Chile, we identify the main drivers of fiscal reforms and seigniorage shocks that Sargent et al. suggest were crucial in the conquest of inflation. We conclude that inflation, after the military coup that deposed Allende's socialist government, was used to finance defence spending non-explicitly considered in the official figures. We interpret these fiscal expenditures as seigniorage shocks. Hence, the Chilean economy was addicted to fiscal deficits for most of the 1970s. Addiction to inflation, in the form of destabilizing inflation expectations that evolved independently of the level of seignorage, was not relevant.

This paper uses multinomial logit to analyze economic insecurity for Chile and Mexico from household surveys. It analyzes the effect changes in well-being, age, health, wealth, employment status, gender, and education have on economic insecurity. The results show that the most significant variable is current exposure to adverse events, the second most significant is age, and the third is health. The current exposure to adverse events produces great anxiety and concern about and the inability to recover from these bad events. Older households assign higher probabilities to negative prospects and are thus subject to higher levels of economic insecurity. This also occurs when the household head is seriously ill. The effect of gender and wealth on negative expectations is very small, while education only affects Mexico, and self-employment affects only Chile. Finally, the similarities between Chile and Mexico provide evidence of identifiable patterns for economic insecurity in Latin American countries. © 2013 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.

This article examines the development of mechanization in the hacienda system of Central Chile, an oligarchic rural society in a peripheral country, by discussing the role and interests of the main social and institutional actors involved in the introduction and diffusion of agricultural machinery. Mechanization was implemented from power by dominant actors in the Chilean economy, above all the large landowners, and the foreign commercial firms that imported machinery. Thus, it concentrated on the harvests of wheat, alfalfa and clover, the main commercial crops on Central Chile’s haciendas. In addition, mechanization consisted in the diffusion of imported machines and implements. The incipient Chilean metal industries (foundries) were not able to develop as significant producers of agricultural equipment. Despite their contradicting interests, those actors, along with state agricultural institutions’ experts, formed a knowledge elite that not only adopted but, more fundamentally, selected and creatively adapted those types and models of agricultural machines that demonstrated to be more suitable to the hacienda system. © 2023 Instituto de Estudios Sociohistoricos. All rights reserved.

The purpose of this paper is to determine trends in the wages and living standards of male agricultural labourers in Central Chile during the agrarian expansion, c. 1870-1930. We found that nominal wages increased eightfold; this is relevant because wage labour became the main rural labour regime in this period. Nominal wages rose steadily from the early 1870s until 1910, and with significant fluctuations thereafter, before plummeting with the Great Depression. Real wages also increased, but only slightly. Furthermore, during certain short periods, agricultural labourers' real wages were similar to or higher than those of low-skilled urban workers. However, the persistent gap between agricultural and non-agricultural wages was one of the causal factors of the outmigration of rural workers.

This article assesses the state of the agrarian sector and the composition of the Chilean agrarian elite during the first half of the nineteenth century, a rather unexplored period in Chile's agrarian historiography. We have used several untapped sources such as the Catastro Agrícola and El Agricultor. From the former we have built and processed a half a million records database. From the former we have built and processed a database consisting of half a million records from the first three agricultural censuses of 1832, 1838 and 1852. We have explained why the agricultural sector was so backwards in Chile, while also established a very unequal distribution of both land tenure and agricultural income. Finally, our results show a great persistence within the composition of the agrarian elites between late colonial times and the first decades of republican Chile, as well as a significant correlation between the large landowners with highest agricultural income and the political elite. © Historia (Santiago) 2017.

We examine the effect of air pollution (particulate matter under 10 ?g/m3, or mp10 concentrations) on sick leaves due to the child's health being affected. Our dataset is a large panel of Chilean parent-child pairs observed during the 52 weeks of 2007. Two main findings are reported. First, mp10 concentrations have a strong effect on child hospitalizations, and in particular hospitalizations for respiratory conditions. Second, mp10 concentrations also have an important effect on parental sick leaves when the underlying diagnosis is related to a respiratory condition, but no effects are observed in aggregate parental sick leaves. © Hitotsubashi University.

The average height of a population has been recently taken as a good indicator of biological welfare, and therefore of standards of living and economic development. This article provides the first available series for Chile, providing the evolution of the average height of Chilean soldiers (male) born from the 1730s to the 1980s, using a sample of 6.200 individuals. This sample can be safely taken as a good proxy of the average height of Chilean male population for the period under study. Having analysed our data, our main conclusions are: (i) around mid-eighteenth century the average height of Chileans was rather high if compared to Chile itself, as well as to other countries of the region and Europe; (ii) during the nineteenth century the average height of Chileans declined during a long spell, (iii) in the twentieth century there was an important increase in the average male height, but in the developed world height increased faster than in Chile. © 2018, Universidad Catolica del Norte.

This paper studies the catching up process in per capita income of the so-called Asian Dragons and Tigers. It contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it tests the catching up hypothesis using the longest time span ever considered, from 1870 to 2014. Second, it documents the experiences of these two groups of countries and provides potential explanations for them. Third, the analysis of the paper uses the Kejriwal and Perron (J Time Ser Anal 31:305–328, 2010) algorithm which allows us to endogenously estimate multiple structural breaks in the level and the trend of the series without prior knowledge of their integration level. This surpasses technical concerns of previous empirical studies. Fourth, it inquiries into how the Asian financial crisis affected the catching up process among the Dragons and Tigers economies. © 2018 Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

We test whether the availability of the emergency contraceptive (‘morning after’) pill in the absence of legalised abortion can have effects similar to those of other large-scale contraceptive reforms. To do so, we examine a quasi-experimental policy reform occurring in Chile in 2008. Using vital statistics covering all births and foetal deaths over the period 2006–12, we show that the availability of the emergency contraceptive pill reduces pregnancy and early gestation foetal death, which we argue proxies for illegal abortion. Our results suggest that in the context of Chile, a country with among the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, the emergency contraceptive pill had effects around a third as large as various abortion reforms observed in other contexts. © 2016 Royal Economic Society

This essay analyses the circumstances under which a redistributive barter system with centralized merchants dominates over primitive unstructured barter. It emphasizes the role of the geographical spread to explain the emergence of structured trade. The model analytically shows how, in the presence of taste for variety and increasing returns to scale in the production of commodities, the opportunity cost of direct bartering interacts with the transport costs and the geographical spread to explain the existence of intermediaries, and provides some interesting links between the literature on market emergence and the birth and growth of cities. © 2010 the author(s). Journal compilation © 2010 RSAI.

This article addresses three main issues: why there is such a huge diversity of disposable income inequality across the world, why there is such a deterioration of market inequality among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and why inequality seems to move in 'waves'. There are many underlying questions: does diversity reflect a variety of fundamentals, or a multiplicity of power structures and choice? Is rising market inequality the product of somehow 'exogenous' factors (e.g., r>g), or of complex interactions between political settlements and market failures? How do we get through the veils obscuring these interactions and distorting our vision of the often self-constructed nature of inequality? Has neoliberal globalization broadened the scope for 'distributional failures' by, for example, triggering a process of 'reverse catching-up' in the OECD, so that highly unequal middle-income countries like those in Latin America now embody the shape of things to come? Are we all converging towards features such as mobile elites creaming off the rewards of economic growth, and 'magic realist' politics that lack self-respect if not originality? Should I say, 'Welcome to the Third World'? In this paper I also develop a new approach for examining and measuring inequality (distance from distributive targets), and a new concept of 'distributional waves'. The article concludes that, to understand current distributive dynamics, what matters is to comprehend the forces determining the share of the rich - and, in terms of growth, what they choose to do with it (and how they are allowed do it).

In a context in which increased income inequality has raised much concern, and skilled workers move easily across countries, an important question arises: how does the brain drain affect income distribution in the source economy? We address this question and introduce two contributions to the literature on brain drain. First, we present and solve a simple stylized model to study whether and, if so, how the brain drain affects the distribution of income, in a context in which higher education is publicly financed with general taxes. Second, we explore empirically the effect of an increase in skilled emigration on income distribution. A key prediction of our theoretical model is the existence of a non-monotonic relationship between income inequality and emigration of skilled workers. Our empirical data confirm this result, showing a statistically significant inverse U-shaped form. © 2017, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria.

In 1808, after the Portuguese royal family was forced to leave Portugal and move to Brazil, Brazilian ports were opened to British merchant houses, which were quick to open offices in the likes of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. By 1810 there were probably over 200 British merchant houses operating in Brazil, but we know very little about them because most of their historical records have not survived. In addition, scholars have assumed that, on account of the dominant British economic power, the establishment of new mercantile houses in South America c. 1808-19 was an easy task. This assumption is challenged in this paper, which sheds new light on the activities of one of these British merchant houses, making use of a recently discovered business collection concerned with the activities of Wylie & Hancock, a Scottish house which operated in Brazil and the River Plate from 1808 to 1819. These papers also provide a unique insight into neglected topics such as: the nature of managerial mercantile organisations; what the economic actors at the time actually did and thought; and how strategic and tactical choices were reached. © 2013 © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Using a panel data set for international corporate bonds and capital account restrictions in advanced and emerging economies, we show that restrictions on capital inflows produce a substantial and economically meaningful increase in corporate bond spreads, with a one-standard-deviation increase in our capital controls index increasing spreads by up to 35 basis points. The effect of capital controls on inflows differs across firms and across countries; the effect is particularly strong for firms that face more restricted access to alternative sources of external financing. Our findings establish a novel channel through which capital controls affect economic outcomes. © 2019, International Monetary Fund.