Summary: This paper studies the long-run effects of concertaje, a forced labor system from the Spanish colonial era in Ecuador that coerced indigenous workers in rural estates after indebting them. I collected and digitized historical tax records (1800) and connected them to contemporary ones (2010s) via surnames. Employing a TS2SLS approach, I find that a 10 percentage point (pp) increase in a surname's concertaje rate reduces the current formal income of (pseudo) descendants by 1.7%. On a regional scal

Author(s): Alex Rivadeneira 

Summary: This paper evaluates the influence of central bank's projections and narrative signals provided in the summaries of its Inflation Report on the expectations of professional forecasters for inflation and GDP growth in the case of Mexico. We use the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, a text-mining technique, to identify narrative signals. We show that both quantitative and qualitative information have an influence on inflation and GDP growth expectations. We also find that narrative signals relate

Author(s): Antón Sarabia Arturo, Bazdresch Santiago, Lelo-de-Larrea Alejandra 

Summary: We develop a theory of commodity taxation featuring imperfect competition along with love-of-variety preferences and endogenous firm entry and exit, and we derive new formulas for the efficiency and pass-through of specific and ad valorem taxes. These formulas unify existing canonical ones and feature a new term capturing the effect of variety on consumer surplus. Intuitively, if taxes reduce product varieties in the market, then the impact on social welfare depends on how much consumers value v

Author(s): Kroft Kory, Laliberté Jean-William, Leal Vizcaíno René, Notowidigdo Matthew J. 

Summary: In the United States, prospective foster parents must become licensed by a child welfare agency before a foster child can be placed in their care. This paper contributes by developing a theoretical matching model to study the optimal menu of licenses designed to screen foster parents. We construct a two-sided matching model with heterogeneous agents, adverse selection, search frictions, and a designer who coordinates match formation through a menu of contracts. We focus on incentive compatible c

Author(s): Altinok Ahmet, Mac Donald Diana E. 

Summary: The pandemic generated heterogeneous demand shocks in the food away from home industry's consumption channels: on-site and deliveries/takeaways. Hence, price adjustments by consumption channel could have also been different. This study examines dishes' prices intended to be consumed as deliveries, which come from an online food ordering and delivery platform in Mexico City (CDMX)- as well as those aimed at on-site consumption, which are considered in CDMX's CPI. I document that during part of th

Author(s): Solórzano Diego 

Summary: This paper estimates the effects of a subway expansion on labor market outcomes in Santiago, Chile. First, we estimate these effects through a reduced-form analysis. We find changes in work locations and wages consistent with a reduction in firms' labor market power in areas where the subway expanded. We then lay out a model with labor market oligopsonies to calculate the welfare gains from the subway expansion. The model allows decomposition of welfare gains into i) efficiency gains from improv

Author(s): Vial Lecaros Felipe, D. Zárate Román, Pérez Pérez Jorge 

Summary: In this paper, we investigate the effect of weather shocks on the price of two crops of great importance in Mexican agriculture: white corn and dry beans. We rely on panel data techniques applied to a 20-year long panel of prices at the market/city level. Our results show that positive temperature and negative precipitation shocks of at least 0.5 standard deviations relative to the climate normal have immediate and lagged positive effects on the price of these crops. The immediate effect is abou

Author(s): Arellano Gonzalez Jesus, Juárez-Torres Miriam, Zazueta Borboa Francisco 

Summary: Many companies are setting ambitious targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) per the Paris Agreement. However, there is limited evidence on the market effects of setting those targets. Using a GARCH model with a trend developed by the authors and a panel fixed effects model, this paper analyzes the short-run effects of committing and setting GHG targets on public companies' stock price returns and volatility. We find no evidence that committing or setting a target yields higher re

Author(s): Guerrero-Escobar Santiago, Hernández-del-Valle Gerardo, Hernández Vega Marco, De-la-Mora Paula 

Summary: This work is based on a new Keynesian theoretical model for an advanced economy, which incorporates overlapping generations to analyze a channel through which fluctuations in household financial wealth influence aggregate demand. The optimal monetary policy, corresponding to that of a central planner maximizing households' welfare, aims to mitigate financial fluctuations while simultaneously reducing variability in inflation and the output gap. The model is calibrated for the United States and r

Author(s): Adame Espinosa Francisco 

Summary: This paper investigates the effect of crises on the intra-household allocation of resources. To study this issue, I use survey data from Mexico and estimate a structural model of household behavior to recover how much resources are allocated to each household member. Then, I construct a proxy for women's bargaining power using the women's control of resources and document how it evolves over periods of economic stability and contraction. The results suggest that during the COVID-19 crisis period

Author(s): Casco José L.