Browsing by Author "Zurita, Felipe"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    Assessing the short-run effects of lockdown policies on economic activity, with an application to the Santiago Metropolitan Region, Chile
    (PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2021) Fosco, Constanza; Zurita, Felipe
    This paper develops a methodology for the assessment of the short-run effects of lockdown policies on economic activity. The methodology combines labor market data with simulation of an agent-based model. We apply our methodology to the Santiago Metropolitan Region, Chile. We recover the model parameters from observed data, taking into account the recurring policy adjustments that characterized the study window. The model is used to build counterfactual scenarios. We estimate an 8 percent output loss in the first 5 months of the pandemic from the policy that was put in place, achieving a 56 percent reduction in the total number of infections. During this period, with an output loss to 10.5 percent of GDP, the infection rate would have decreased 92 percent, significantly delaying the spread of COVID and spike in infections. Our methodology applied to real data provided results that could be valuable in guiding policies in other lockdown situations in times of disaster, pandemics or social upheaval.
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    Bankruptcy prediction for Chilean companies
    (BANCO CENTRAL CHILE, 2008) Zurita, Felipe
    This paper compares statistical and option-based models of financial instability for the group of listed Chilean companies. Statistical models have the properfit, although the peculiar history of bankruptcies in the period of analysis, namely their concentration in the early period, questions their usefulness as a predictive tool. In models based on option theory, on the other hand average bankruptcy probabilities appear to be highly correlated with bank risk indicators, and precedes them by up to three quarters. Overall, this first measuring effort is moderately succesful, but reveals a number of paths worth exploring.
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    La Economía Financiera Frente a la Crisis
    (2009) Zurita, Felipe
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    Essays on life-cycle savings and consumption
    (2020) Kim Lee, Hay Jin; Zurita, Felipe; Bobenrieth H., Eugenio S.; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    This dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first chapter includes a brief literature survey on life-cycle precautionary saving. It presents a stochastic life-cycle model of consumption and savings and summarizes the empirical evidence on the degree of precautionary saving. The second chapter studies the savings behavior of households over the life-cycle by revisiting Gourinchas and Parker (2002). I find that target wealth behavior differs substantially from actual savings behavior in a finite-horizon consumption life-cycle model. While the target value of wealth is a good indicator of the overall direction to which the distribution of normalized cash-on-hand moves, it fails to describe the magnitude of household overall savings. Furthermore, the age-profile of the target value of liquid wealth depends crucially on the model’s assumptions instead of observed consumer behavior. Moreover, the target value of cash-on-hand is sensitive to small changes (within confidence intervals for such parameter values) in the model’s parameters, such as the interest rate, when the marginal propensity to consume is less than one. The third chapter examines the aggregate implications of the individual life-cycle behavior predicted by Gourinchas and Parker (2002) in light of Carroll (2000). I show that the appropriateness of a representative-agent depends on the age of the population and the retirement income profile. However, I find that the predicted distribution of cash-on-hand does not match the wealth holdings in microeconomic data, despite the various combinations of parameter values that are considered. This discrepancy sheds light in the suitability of the life-cycle model to reproduce the observed saving behavior across U.S. households. The fourth chapter evaluates the use of the endogenous grid-points solution method when estimating a stochastic life-cycle model. The Monte Carlo results suggest that one must be cautious when adopting this solution method when numerically minimizing the Simulated Method of Moments estimators’ objective function. The mode of the SMM estimates for the coefficient of risk aversion is approximately zero when its true value is small.
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    Evolving to the Impatience Trap: The Example of the Farmer-Sheriff Game
    (2011) Levine, David K.; Modica, Salvatore; Weinschelbaum, Federico; Zurita, Felipe
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    Un examen a la tasa de descuento
    (2005) Zurita, Felipe
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    Liquidity and Market Incompleteness
    (2007) Zurita, Felipe
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    On Reputational Rents as an Incentive Mechanism in Competitive Markets
    (2009) Vial Lira, Bernardita Pilar; Zurita, Felipe
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    The Brother in Law Effect
    (2005) Levine, David K.; Weinschelbaum, Federico; Zurita, Felipe
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    THE BROTHER-IN-LAW EFFECT
    (2010) Levine, David K.; Weinschelbaum, Federico; Zurita, Felipe
    When a firm is forced to pay abnormally high wages, hiring transfers rents. This effectively endows the employer with the ability to grant favors, and he may wish to do so even at some cost to efficient production. We refer to this as the brother-in-law effect. This article analyzes its consequences. When the brother-in-law effect is due to unionization, decisions regarding both the number and type of workers employed could be inefficient; overemployment could obtain even relative to the workforce that would be employed without unionization. We also identify cases in which nepotism improves efficiency.