Browsing by Author "Lopez, Matias"

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    A multifactor stochastic volatility model of commodity prices
    (2017) Cortazar, Gonzalo; Lopez, Matias; Naranjo, Lorenzo
    We propose a novel representation of commodity spot prices in which the cost-of-carry and the spot price volatility are both driven by an arbitrary number of risk factors, nesting many existing specifications. The model exhibits unspanned stochastic volatility, provides simple closed-form expressions of commodity futures, and yields analytic formulas of European options on futures. We estimate the model using oil futures and options data, and find that the pricing of traded contracts is accurate for a wide,range of maturities and strike prices. The results suggest that at least three risk factors in the spot price volatility are needed to accurately fit the volatility surface of options on oil futures, highlighting the importance of using general multifactor models in pricing commodity contingent claims. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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    Assessing the Risk of Democratic Reversal in the United States: A Reply to Kurt Weyland
    (CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2021) Lopez, Matias; Pablo Luna, Juan
    By replying to Kurt Weyland's (2020) comparative study of populism, we revisit optimistic perspectives on the health of American democracy in light of existing evidence. Relying on a set-theoretical approach, Weyland concludes that populists succeed in subverting democracy only when institutional weakness and conjunctural misfortune are observed jointly in a polity, thereby conferring on the United States immunity to democratic reversal. We challenge this conclusion on two grounds. First, we argue that the focus on institutional dynamics neglects the impact of the structural conditions in which institutions are embedded, such as inequality, racial cleavages, and changing political attitudes among the public. Second, we claim that endogeneity, coding errors, and the (mis)use of Boolean algebra raise questions about the accuracy of the analysis and its conclusions. Although we are skeptical of crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis as an adequate modeling choice, we replicate the original analysis and find that the paths toward democratic backsliding and continuity are both potentially compatible with the United States.
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    States, elites, and inequality in Latin America
    (2018) Lopez, Matias
    In this article, I review the literature on elites and inequality in Latin America with a focus on the emergence of uneven state structures and how they came to foster the needs of elites for protection. States in Latin America are traditionally thought of as facilitating processes of top-down modernization that transformed traditional agrarian economies into complex urban polities, while maintaining extreme inequality. The state is thus central in the genealogy of inequality and elite privilege in Latin America. The synergy between states and elites continues to mark Latin American societies, and it helps us to understand how major economic and political changes occur without significant changes in inequality. For the most part, Latin America's current uneven states emerged as the result of exclusionary projects of citizenship during the first half of the 20th century and were advanced by the advent of repressive regimes during the 1960s and 1970s. After democratic transitions during the 1980s and 1990s, Latin American states came to be characterized, on the one hand, by procedural democratic institutions and on the other, by high levels of state violence, exclusion, and segmented citizenship. The present situation is one of a problematic equilibrium between states, elites, and inequality.