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This paper empirically investigates whether aspiring emigrants from nineteen Latin American countries to the United States hold a different set of cultural traits compared to stayers. Using Gallup World Poll data and proxy on individual pro social behaviors and political attitudes towards the pres- ident of the United States, we observe that aspiring migrants share more pro social behaviors and support more the U.S. political leader than stayers. We find that already existing migration network reduces cultural selection on social behaviors, which holds mainly among the young and less edu- cated population, and in less developed countries. The paper shows that such cultural self-selection is unlikely to affect the distribution of cultural traits in the origin countries, avoiding potential negative effects for Latin American countries. If any, culturally selected immigrants should have a beneficial effect to the United States.

Estimated Taylor rules became popular as a description of monetary policy conduct. There are numerous reasons why real monetary policy can be asymmetric and estimated Taylor rule nonlinear. This paper tests whether monetary policy can be described as asymmetric in three new European Union (EU) members (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland), which apply an inflation targeting regime. Two different empirical frameworks are

Felipe Pérez Martí, who was the Venezuelan Minister of Planning and Development in the government of Hugo Chávez, proposes an economic model that he calls the altruistic economy or fourth way, which leads cooperative game theory to its logical extremes postulating a pure communism. Here we sustain that, first, it is impossible in the model of Pérez Martí to marginally allocate non-primary goods to those most in need or who most value them, facing a problem of defective economic calculation, and second, in order to achieve equality, he would have to replace his atomic local planners by a central planner, who would be unable to overcome the problem of imperfect and and incomplete information.

The purpose of this contribution is to draw a picture of the (uneven) distribution of economic activities across the states of the European Union (EU) and the consequences entailed by it. We will briefly summarize the most salient and recent contributions. Then, in the light of the economic geography theory, we will discuss the economic and social advantages and disadvantages associated with a core- periphery structure. In this sense, particular attention will be addressed to the EU financial system of Structural Funds and the effects they produced. Finally, we will formulate some suggestions, relying on the EU experience, that could be of interest to the current Brazilian regional policy.

This paper has three objectives. First, it aims at revealing the logic of interest rate setting pursued by monetary authorities of 12 new EU members. Using estimation of an augmented Taylor rule, we find that this setting was not always consistent with the official monetary policy. Second, we seek to shed light on the inflation process of these countries. To this end, we carry out an estimation of an open economy Philips curve (PC). Our main finding is that inflation rates were not only driven by backward persistency but also held a forward-looking component. Finally, we assess the viability of existing monetary arrangements for price stability. The analysis of the conditional inflation variance obtained from GARCH estimation of PC is used for this purpose. We conclude that inflation targeting is preferable to an exchange rate peg because it allowed decreasing the inflation rate and anchored its volatility.

La desnutrición crónica ha sido una condición persistente entre niños/as Ecuatorianos/as. Tiene el potencial de perpetuar el ciclo de la pobreza ya que afecta el desarrollo cognitivo, los logros académicos y, por ende, el potencial flujo de ingresos durante el ciclo de vida. El programa de suplementos nutricionales instituido por el gobierno reabastece la provisión de micronutrientes a través de suplementos nutricionales diarios. En el Capítulo 2 se aplica una serie de modelos de regresión discontinua y de variables instrumentales y no se encuentra evidencia de que el tratamiento ha tenido un efecto significativo sobre los niveles de hemoglobina entre niños/as. ¿Existen otras causas de la desnutrición? La literatura médica indica que el estrés maternal pre-natal puede incrementar el riesgo de consecuencias adversas para el/la niño/a al nacer las cuales pueden tener repercusiones más tarde durante el ciclo de vida ya que el exponer al feto a condiciones adversas en-útero afecta una serie de "interruptores" de la secuencia genética del individuo llamados la epigenetica. En el Capítulo 3, se estudia directamente este propuesto mecanismo utilizando la crisis financiera de 1999 como un shock de estrés no anticipado a través de una regresión discontinua llamada "sharp" o "aguda." Se encuentra que los/as niños/as expuestas en-útero tienen puntajes z de la talla para la edad significativamente más bajos que sus contrapartes no expuestos. Consecuentemente, el limitado efecto del programa de suplementación nutricional puede ser parcialmente explicado por la exposición al estrés maternal pre-natal. Adicionalmente, este locus biológico conectando el estrés maternal pre-natal a la trayectoria de crecimiento infantil provee un proceso teórico conectando la exclusión social y la salud individual. Para estudiar la validez de lo anterior, en el Capítulo 4, se mide el efecto de la desigualdad de consumo sobre la desnutrición a nivel individual. Se encuentra un impacto exógeno del coeficiente de Gini, independiente del efecto del ...

Based on the compilation of Uruguayan department-level data, this paper argues that the extent of fiscal commitment to primary education during the first half of the 20th century can be explained by the interests of tactically motivated politicians. The empirical test relies on panel data fixed effects models covering 18 Uruguayan departments over 40 years. The main findings reveal that political motivations have had a significant role in schooling provision across the territory. Throughout the period, the incumbent government seems to have used the resource allocation in primary education both to reward its core supporters and to persuade political opponents

To what extent can be electoral results in Catalonia explained by the exposure of individuals to television? This paper sheds light on this question by looking into the effect of TV3 on two distinguished political outcomes in the 1984 Catalan Parliamentary election. The outcomes of interest are voter turnout and the vote share of Convergència i Unió (CiU), one of the strongest political forces in Catalonia who has mainly driven the channel since its creation. We resort to a natural experiment based on the geographically differentiated expansion of TV3 in Catalonia. Using a Difference-in-Differences Kernel matching method, we found that the introduction of TV3 caused an increase both in the voter turnout and the CiU vote share in the 1984 Catalan parliamentary elections.

This article investigates whether vote-buying and the instigation of violence in the disputed 2007 Kenyan elections were strategically motivated, and whether those affected by electoral violence changed their views towards ethno-politics and the use of violence. To answer these questions, a panel survey conducted before and after the elections is combined with external indicators of electoral violence. We find that political parties targeted vote-buying towards specific groups to weaken the support of their political rivals and to mobilize their own supporters. Furthermore, parties instigated violence strategically in areas where they were less likely to win. Although the victims of violence would prefer that parties are no longer allowed to organize in ethnic or religious lines, they are more likely to identify in ethnic terms, support the use of violence and avoid relying on the police to resolve disputes. The overall findings suggest an increased risk of electoral-violence reoccurring.

Even though the current literature investigating the labor market impact of immigration assumes implicitly or explicitly labor market regulation as exogenous to immigration (both in terms of size and composition), this is not necessarily the case. This paper shows that the composition of the immigrant population affects, in the medium and long-run, the labor market regulation. We build a new workers protection index based on 36 labor law variables over a sample of 70 developed and developing countries from 1970 to 2010. Exploiting a dynamic panel set- ting using both internal and external instruments, we find that migrants impact the destination countries' workers protection mainly through the degree of workers protection experienced in their origin countries, captured by an "epidemiological" effect. On the other hand, the size of the immigrant population has a small and rather insignif- icant effect. The results are robust to alternative and competing immigration effects such as diversity, polarization and skill-selection. The effects are particularly strong across two dimensions of the workers protection index: worker representation laws and employment forms laws. This paper provides suggestive evidence that immigrants' participation to unions and its implications for the political actors is one of the potential mechanisms through which the epidemiological effect could materialize. Finally, calculations based on the estimated coefficients suggest that immigration contributes to a reduction of the degree of workers protection, particularly in OECD high-income countries.

El objetivo de este trabajo es estudiar algunos aspectos del movimiento laboral intersectorial. Estudiamos dos sectores: formal y sombra. El sector formal comercia bienes legales con actividades económicas reguladas. El sector sombra, por el contrario, comercia bienes legales e ilegales con actividades económicas desreguladas. Si los bienes son legales entonces el sector sombra es informal. En el otro caso, es ilegal. El objetivo es ofrecer una mejor comprensión en cuanto a los efectos de algunas políticas gubernamentales sobre el movimiento de trabajadores de un sector a otro. En el primer capítulo construimos un modelo de búsqueda no dirigida manteniendo exógeno el esfuerzo por cumplir la ley. En el segundo capítulo construimos un modelo de búsqueda y emparejamiento dirigido pero haciendo endógeno el esfuerzo por aplicar la ley. Finalmente, el tercer capítulo estudia el movimiento laboral intersectorial en una economía abierta con inmigración ilegal. Una de las contribuciones claves de estos tres capítulos es resaltar la importancia del cumplimiento de la ley sobre los agentes que deciden trabajar en las sombras. Mejores tasas de monitoreo hacen que la política fiscal y de subsidio al desempleo sean más eficaces en su objetivo de prevenir a las personas de estar fuera de la regulación gubernamental. ; The aim of this work is to study some aspects of the intersector labor movement. We study two sectors: formal and shadow. Formal sector trades legal goods with regulated economic activities. The shadow sector, instead, trades legal and illegal goods with unregulated economic activities. If the goods are legal then the shadow sector is informal. It is illegal otherwise. We would like to shed light as to the effects of some government policies on the transition of workers from one sector to the other. In the first chapter we construct an undirected search model with exogenous enforcement. In the second chapter we construct a directed search and matching model with endogenous enforcement effort. Finally, the third ...

One of the most popular options for promoting public transport use is the provision of an integrated and high quality public transport system. This was the strategy adopted by the regional government in Madrid in 1986 and since then public transport patronage has increased by more than 50%. This paper has two objectives. The first is to identify the factors underlying the significant increase in the demand for public transport in Madrid. To do this we estimate an aggregate demand function for bus and underground trips, which allows us to obtain the demand elasticities with respect to the main attributes of public transport services and also to calculate the long-term impact of changes in those explanatory variables on patronage. The second objective is to evaluate the impact on revenue derived from the introduction of the travel card scheme, and to discuss the consequences on revenue of changes in the relative fare levels of different types of ticket without substantially affecting patronage. This latter issue is addressed by estimating a matrix of own and cross-price elasticities for different ticket types.

One of the main causes of mortality worldwide is air pollution. To tackle this problem, local, regional and national governments have implemented policies to reduce emissions from industrial and on-road sources. However, when these policies are being designed, shipping emissions are often overlooked. There has been a drastic increase in the demand for cruises and its economic relevance is also growing in port-cities. Barcelona is Europe's leading cruise port, and it is located near the centre of the city. In this context, this paper analyses the impact of cruise ships in the air quality of the entire city of Barcelona using a dataset with information about pollutants and the number of cruises arriving to the port. We show that there is a direct impact between cruises staying at the port and city pollution. Additionally, the size and age of the cruise also affect air quality. The larger (or newer) the cruise is, the higher the emission generated. Moreover, our simulations show that the whole city is affected by these emissions.

In this study, we analyse the degree of polarisation-a concept fundamentally different from that of inequality-in the international distribution of CO2 emissions per capita in the European Union. It is analytically relevant to examine the degree of instability inherent to a distribution and, in the analysed case, the likelihood that the distribution and its evolution will increase or decrease the chances of reaching an agreement. Two approaches were used to measure polarisation: the endogenous approach, in which countries are grouped according to their similarity in terms of emissions, and the exogenous approach, in which countries are grouped geographically. Our findings indicate a clear decrease in polarisation since the mid-1990s, which can essentially be explained by the fact that the different groups of countries have converged (i.e. antagonism among the CO2 emitters has decreased) as the contribution of energy intensity to between-group differences has decreased. This lower degree of polarisation in CO2 distribution suggests a situation more conducive to the possibility of reaching EU-wide agreements on the mitigation of CO2 emissions.

The design of European mitigation policies requires a detailed examination of the factors explaining the unequal emissions in the different countries. This research analyzes the evolution of inequality in CO2 per capita emissions in the European Union (EU-27) in the 1990-2006 period and its explanatory factors. For this purpose, we decompose the Theil index of inequality into the contributions of the different Kaya factors. The decomposition is also applied to the inequality between and within groups of countries (North Europe, South Europe, and East Europe). The analysis shows an important reduction in inequality, to a large extent due to the smaller differences between groups and because of the lower contribution of the energy intensity factor. The importance of the GDP per capita factor increases and becomes the main explanatory factor. However, within the different groups of countries the carbonization index appears to be the most relevant factor in explaining inequalities.