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Journal Article
The effect of immigration on output mix, capital, and productivity
The growing influx of immigrants into the United States has prompted concerns about potential negative effects on native workers, especially the less skilled. Such concerns have not been borne out by many studies of the effect of immigration on wages. However, the typical theoretical negative effect of immigration flows on wages may be offset by changes in other aspects of the economy, including output mix, productivity, and capital. ; This article examines the relationship between immigration and three factors-output mix, labor productivity, and capital-in the skilled and unskilled sectors ...
Journal Article
Official dollarization and the banking system in Ecuador and El Salvador
In January 2000 Ecuador adopted the U.S. dollar as legal tender, and El Salvador followed suit in 2001. The two countries officially dollarized under quite different circumstances: Ecuador was suffering an economic and banking crisis, while El Salvador enjoyed economic stability and low inflation rates. This article studies the evolution of the banking system in these two countries before and after official, or full, dollarization. ; In Ecuador the reforms that ensued from full dollarization have improved transparency and banking performance and competitiveness, but the implementation and ...
Working Paper
Trade and the skill premium in developing countries: the role of intermediate goods and some evidence from Peru
The rise in income inequality in developing countries after trade liberalization has been a puzzle for trade theory, which predicts the opposite effect. The authors present a model with imported intermediate goods in which the relative wages of skilled labor can rise due to higher imports of inputs or due to skill-biased technological change. The evidence from Peru in the post-liberalization phase in the early 1990s supports the skilled-biased technological change hypothesis. The authors find that most of the decrease in the blue-collar wage share in the manufacturing industries can be ...
Journal Article
Monetary policy alternatives for Latin America
During the 1990s, many Latin American countries began to address their problems with recession, inflation, and unemployment through dramatic economic reforms and monetary policy strategies that included exchange rate pegs, monetary aggregate targeting, or inflation targeting. Inflation targeting, in particular, had begun to lower inflation rates and to stabilize or increase real economic growth in countries such as New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom. But has inflation targeting proved as successful for Latin American economies? ; This article describes the recent history of monetary ...
Journal Article
Argentina: the end of convertibility
Working Paper
Does employing undocumented workers give firms a competitive advantage?
Using administrative data from the state of Georgia, this paper finds that on average, among all firms, employing undocumented workers reduces a firm's hazard of exit by 19 percent. However, the impact varies greatly across sectors. In addition, a firm is at a distinct disadvantage if it does not employ undocumented workers but its rivals do. The advantage to employing undocumented workers increases as more firms in the industry do so. In addition, the advantage to a firm from employing undocumented workers decreases with the skill level of the firm's workers, increases with the breadth of a ...
Working Paper
Stabilization programs and policy credibility: Peru in the 1990s
This paper uses a rational expectations macroeconomic model in which economic agents formulate the probability about the sustainability of the economic policy?that is, policy credibility?using current and lagged values of government expenditures and lagged values of the inflation rate. The estimation of the model is based on Hamilton?s switching regime procedure. The contribution of this paper is the empirical estimation of the credibility of the stabilization program implemented in Peru in August 1990. The results of the estimation show that there are two different regimes in the government ...
Journal Article
New financing trends in Latin America : an overview of selected issues and policy challenges
This article summarizes a 2007 conference that explored the nature and implications of major transformations in Latin American financial markets, such as the shift from cross-border to domestic financing and the development of domestic bond markets.
Working Paper
The labor market experience and impact of undocumented workers
Using administrative data from the state of Georgia, the authors find that average wages among documented workers are lower in industries that employ undocumented workers and that a greater share of undocumented workers in those industries further lowers wages. In addition, undocumented workers have significantly lower labor supply elasticity, likely as a result of their limited employment and grievance opportunities. Furthermore, the inflow of undocumented workers does more to displace earlier hired undocumented workers than it does to displace documented workers.
Working Paper
Undocumented worker employment and firm survivability
Do firms employing undocumented workers have a competitive advantage? Using administrative data from the state of Georgia, this paper investigates the incidence of undocumented worker employment across firms and how it affects firm survival. Firms are found to engage in herding behavior, being more likely to employ undocumented workers if competitors do. Rivals' undocumented employment harms firms' ability to survive while firms' own undocumented employment strongly enhances their survival prospects. This finding suggests that firms enjoy cost savings from employing lower-paid undocumented at ...