Libros

Resumen 

We assess the long run effects of The Health Insurance for the Twenty First Century (SMSXXI) Program, part of Mexico’s Seguro Popular, that provides public health insurance for uninsured children under 5  years old. We show that the program led to reductions in out of pocket health expenditures by 13%,  primarily from expenses incurred on hospitalizations. Infant mortality by causes covered by the program were reduced by 5.3% and effects were largest in high baseline mortality areas. Long run health effects, approximately 8 years after the start of the program are reflected in a 0.44 cm average increase in height for birth cohorts exposed to the program, and anthropometric effects are almost 1cm on average for low-income populations. While no effects were detected on health service utilization, results suggest improvements in the quality of health care and specialized personnel are likely channels to explain final outcomes. 

Resumen

The standard assumption in social learning environments is that agents can only learn from others through choice outcomes. We argue that in many settings, agents can also infer information from others’ response times (RT). This can occur any time there is information about the rate of transactions. If RTs reveal agents’ private beliefs in a reliable way, this can increase the provision of information. To investigate this, we conduct a standard information-cascade experiment where subjects make publicly observable decisions. We find that RTs contain information that is not contained in choice outcomes and we identify a simple log-linear relationship between beliefs and RTs. Moreover, in two conditions we manipulate subjects’ ability to observe others’ RTs and find that subjects do incorporate information from others’ RTs into their decisions. Our results suggest that in environments where RTs are publicly available, the information structure may be richer than previously thought.

Resumen

This paper studies the dynamic response of crime to a positive income shock. We estimate the short- and medium-run effect of an increase in copper price on local economies and criminal activity in Chile, the world's leading copper producer. After a decade of high prices, mining municipalities exhibited an improvement on several economic outcomes but did not show lower crime rates compared to non-mining municipalities. To explain this counterintuitive result, we investigate heterogeneous dynamic effects and observe that property crimes decreased at the beginning of the boom. As unskilled employment is increasing only at the beginning of the boom, we discuss whether crime evolves due to temporary labor market adjustments.

Resumen: 

 The literature initiated by Green and Laffont (1986) studies signalling games with hard evidence. Evidence is modeled by restricting the message set of the sender, depending on his type. Glazer and Rubinstein (2004,2006) and Sher (2011) show that, when the sender's utility function is type independent, there is no advantage for the receiver in having commitment power. In this paper, I argue that this way of modelling evidence implicitly assumes it to be 100% accurate. I develop a model with imperfect evidence and show that being able to commit has value for the receiver, unless the evidence is perfectly accurate.

Resumen 

Urbanization in Latin America is increasingly occurring in small and medium cities with functional linkages to rural areas. Empirical evidence suggests that rural-urban linkages contribute to growth and poverty reduction (Berdegué et al., 2015; Christiaensen & Todo, 2016), but much still needs to be learnt about the factors that favour the generation of virtuous rural-urban linkages. This paper investigates why some rural-urban territories in Chile, Colombia and Mexico achieve socially inclusive growth and others do not, using a conceptual framework that seeks to distinguish between proximate and fundamental causes of growth and inclusion. Preliminary findings suggest that (i) rural-urban territories that achieve inclusive growth are those which have increased over time their provision of public goods and services; (ii) an increase in political competition and in indicators of state presence are associated with improvements in inclusion, but not in growth, at least in the short run; and (iii) diversification of production structure away from agriculture is associated with an increase in growth, but, at  east in the short run, with a worsening in social inclusion.

Resumen 

I find that government investment can propagate oil price shocks and amplify macroeconomic fluctuations in oil-exporting countries. Structural vector autoregressions show an oil price shock has different effects in Mexico and Norway, oil-exporting countries featuring markedly different fiscal frameworks. In Mexico, an oil price shock generates an expansion of government investment and a boom in private economic activity. In Norway, the government does not increase investment and the economy expands modestly. A small open economy DSGE model shows government investment propagates oil-price shocks through a productivity-enhancing channel: higher government investment raises the stock of public capital, which is an input in private production. This leads to an increase in the marginal product of private capital and labor, triggering an expansion. Under a prudent policy by which the government saves part of its oil revenue in a sovereign wealth fund and smooths investment, the shock generates a milder and more long-lasting expansion.