3.13 Tesis doctorado

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Essays on dynamic models applied to the Pension Fund Management and Banking Industry in Chile
(2012) Flores Arévalo, Yarela Viviana; Valdés P., Salvador; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
En economía, ha existido un permanente interés en la estimación de modelos estructurales realistas de decisiones de las firmas. Exceptuando algunos casos notables, la mayor parte de los estudios aplicados a industrias oligopólicas utilizan metodologías basadas en modelos simplificados del comportamiento de las firmas en ambientes puramente estáticos. En los últimos años han surgido propuestas metodológicas que permiten enfrentar la estimación de modelos más complejos que incluyen relaciones intertemporales y varios agentes. Esta tesis estudia mediante dos modelos empíricos la modelación dinámica de las industrias de las Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones y Bancaria en Chile. El primer trabajo entrega una aplicación de la reciente metodología de Bajari, Berkard y Levin (2007) que permite estimar juegos dinámicos mediante un algoritmo en dos etapas que no requiere computar el equilibrio perfecto. Esta metodología novedosa aún cuenta con muy pocas aplicaciones que hayan explotado sus ventajas, entre ellas su capacidad de modelar relaciones dinámicas con múltiples agentes. En este trabajo se desarrolla una aplicación concreta de esta metodología en la industria chilena de AFP, que cumple el requisito de estar dominada por relaciones intertemporales en la determinación de sus precios y cantidades de equilibrio. Los resultados confirman el gran potencial que tiene esta metodología para estimar modelos para industrias de estructura compleja, y ofrecen hallazgos de interés general para la política económica. En el segundo trabajo se estiman y comparan los resultados de medir el poder de mercado con un enfoque estático versus un enfoque dinámico. Estas dos perspectivas se contrastan en cada una de las dos familias de métodos más usadas en la literatura de medición del poder de mercado, que son la variación conjetural (o parámetro de conducta) y el test H de Panzar y Rosse. La aplicación empírica es para datos de la banca chilena en el período 1990-2007. Encontramos que el tradicional uso de modelos estáticos sería inadecuado y entregaría parámetros sesgados. Los resultados de los modelos dinámicos revelan que las empresas que conforman la banca chilena poseen un poder de mercado significativo, que los modelos estáticos son incapaces de detectar. En el caso de la banca chilena se observa, además, que la desregulación que se aplicó a fines de los noventa fue de una naturaleza tal, que no afectó los niveles de competencia en la industria bancaria, de acuerdo al test H. Como lección más general, se concluye que las relaciones intertemporales en la oferta y en la demanda de crédito son muy importantes para la correcta estimación del poder de mercado en las industrias bancarias.
Prices as signals of quality : experimentation and information acquisition
(2015) Guadalupi, Carla; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
This paper examines the optimal pricing strategy for newly introduced experience goods in a two-period monopoly market with experimentation and private information about quality. Consumers learn about quality through price signaling and experimentation, and communicate their ndings to other buyers via word of mouth. We show the existence of a unique separating equilibrium that satis es the intuitive criterion. In this equilibrium, a high-quality seller signals high quality through a low introductory price that rises in the next period (after experimentation has occurred), while a low-quality one charges a high introductory price, which declines over time because the revealed information is likely to be bad. This result helps explain recent empirical evidence and case studies on the introductory pricing strategies of rms entering foreign product markets.
Essays in political economics : causes and consequences of political competition
(2017) Baires Montano, Wilber Isaac; Gallego Yáñez, Francisco; Lafortune, Jeanne; Depetris Chauvin, Emilio; Vargas, Juan; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
There is some growing literature exploring the effects of political competition on economic outcomes. This thesis studies not only the economic consequences of political competition, but their causes. On the one hand, I explore the effects of political competition on economic development and some interaction effects of this variable. And on the other, I study the determinants of political competition. In particular, I study the scale effects on political competition.In the first chapter, I investigate the extent to which political competition, as a mechanism of political accountability, may improve economic outcomes. This question is of considerable economic importance for several reasons. First, the traditional accountability mechanism created by competition could take more relevance when shaping the behavior of politicians in countries with weak institutions or with corruption problems. Second, in line with Padovano and Ricciuti (2010), the effects of political competition could be different at different levels of government. Political competition could be more relevant as accountability mechanism in local governments (as compared to the central ones) because of lower voters' information costs and a lower salience of ideological issues (Casey, 2015). Third, according to Key et al (1950), truly competitive environment could provide most effective representative mechanism to political parties. Finally, understanding how political competition interacts with another economic relevant variables also has implications on the design of public policies and institutions.This chapter has focused on the study of the effects of political competition in development outcomes in the context of El Salvador. I use several tools in order to do so. First, I construct a theoretical model which is an extension of the Holmstrom's career concerns model. The model not only predicts that political competition impacts positively economic outcomes, but that this impact is great in places with better realizations of income shocks. This is my first contribution to the theoretical literature. Second, I use rigorous empirical evidence implying causal effects of political competition on economic performance. In particular, I work with an IV methodology to address endogeneity issues and correctly assess the robustness of my results. I use my own historical dataset to construct my instrumental variable: the interaction between the electoral support for a new political party and the previous political ideology of Salvadoran municipalities. I argue that the extent at which this political party introduced political competition depended on the historical ideological affinity of these regions. Third, I empirically test one of the most important theoretical predictions of my model, that the effect's magnitude of political competition on economic development depends on income shocks received by municipalities. Finally, I study the impact of political competition on fiscal outcomes over the political cycle. I show that in regions with more political competition, the probability of borrowing increases in election periods.It is not enough to understand the consequences of political competition. If this variable has impacts on economic development, it could be also important to study the causes of political competition. I already study the effect of the plausibly exogenous entry of a political party on political competition in the case of El Salvador (i.e. the first stage of the empirical strategy of my first chapter) and show that there are factors that affect the extent of this variable. In this line, in my chapter, I study the importance of other variables on political competition. In particular, I explore here the causal effect of the population size (or electorate size) on how politicians compete. So far, the literature has focused on understanding how changes in the size of the electorate (such as the inclusion of a new group of voters) affect economic outcomes (i.e. Husted & Kenny 1997; Lott & Kenny 1999; Miller 2008), but it has not been studied if the size of the electorate itself affects electoral competition, which may be a potential mechanism to explain the effects found in the papers that relate electorate size and economic outcomes.I constructed a large administrative data from Brazil to test this idea. I use an IV methodology to establish a causal effect of population size on political competition. In order to do this, I exploit historical determinants of the current population size of Brazilian regions as my source of exogenous variation. In fact, my instrumental variable is constructed using the population size of municipalities at the end of the XIX century interacted with a dummy variable indicating if a municipality is a former municipality or if it was created after the XIX century. I argue that it will be a stronger relation between the old population size and the current population size of the former municipalities than that of new municipalities, because the latter ones were generally made up by the population at the periphery territory of the first ones (not necessarily representing the real size of the former municipality). My results indicate the existence of positive causal effects of population size on competition.This thesis helps us to understand the dynamics of political competition. The provided mechanisms could help not only in the formulation of strategies of politicians, but also in the correct formulation of public policies related to this variable once the politicians are in office.
La crónica latinoamericana actual como género y discurso
(2018) Aguilar Guzmán, Marcela; Saavedra V., Gonzalo; Bachmann C., Ingrid; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Facultad de Comunicaciones
Education, crime and violence: evidence of interventions in developing countries
(2018) Dinarte Díaz, Lelys Ileana; Martínez Alvear, Claudia; Lafortune, Jeanne; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
This dissertation contains three essays on crime, violence, and education in the frame of development economics. The first two chapters study how specific educational interventions and the way they are implemented can determine students’ cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, including socio-emotional skills and violent behavior. Finally, the last chapter explores how providing public infrastructure in developing countries can drive some unintended short-term effects on their economic development.
Essays in applied microeconometrics
(2019) García Echalar, Andrés; Rau Binder, Tomás Andrés; González Ramírez, Felipe Andrés; Martínez Alvear, Claudia Paz; Urzúa, Sergio; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
In the Regression Discontinuity (RD) design,discontinuities in the density function of the running variable may harm identification and bias estimations as in the manipulation and heaping cases. This paper proposes a new robust approach that consistently estimates the Average Treatment . Effect near the cutoff under discontinuities in the distribution function of the running variable. The approach consists of sample-reweighting the outcome prior to the estimation of the causal effect.This paper also discusses the limitation of existing indirect tests about the validity of the RD estimation results and presents sufficient conditions for identification that are directly linked to those tests.Simulated examples are presented to assess the finite simple performance of the proposed approach, while non-simulated examples use real data and compare to existing correction methods that partially identify the effect. The Reweighted-RD design applies to any setting with or without discontinuities in the conditional or marginal distributions while maintaining all the distinctive features of th econventional RD design.
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.
Essays in sovereign debt and default
(2020) Cobas Barquet, Adriana Jennifer; Kohn, David; Harrison Vergara, Rodrigo José; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
Mi tesis se enmarca dentro de la literatura teórica de deuda soberana y aborda dos aspectos relevantes que tienen que ver con el proceso de reestructuración de deuda en default. El primer capítulo presenta aspectos de la reciente desintermediación del mercado de deuda soberana en economías emergentes y propone un modelo multietapas de teoría de juegos para determinar cómo impacta en el resultado de la restructuración. Se demuestra que en este contexto surgen costos de coordinación de magnitud significativa que debe enfrentar el gobierno para lograr una negociación exitosa. El segundo capítulo se enfoca en el periodo de exclusión luego del default y en particular en el tiempo que se extiende entre la restructuración y el retorno final al mercado de capitales. Se propone un modelo cuantitativo standard de default soberano para analizar la contribución de costos de emisión fijos y variables a la duración de este periodo, así como para comprender los principales mecanismos que en él participan.
Essays in information acquisition and campaign finance
(2021) Sauma Webb, Mauricio José; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
Essays in income tax evasion
(2022) Castillo Ramos, Sebastián; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Besfamille, Martin; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
Governments recurrently come back to ask the best way to increase tax collection, based on constant necessities to increase its spending. Generally, increasing tax collection is associated with a tax raise, mainly motivated by the agent’s mechanical responses, i.e., assuming that taxpayers do not adjust their taxable income. However, the behavioral response (the adjustment in the agent’s taxable income, for instance) produces a variety of consequences in different markets. Indeed, a rise in taxes changes the evasion’s gains altering the incentives to participate in occupations with higher evasion facilities. This thesis is devoted to studying this issue throughout two chapters. Each of these chapters inquires over the consequences of the tax policy in contexts where tax evasion and occupational decision coexist. The first chapter studies the causal effect of income tax evasion on self-employment decisions. We develop a theoretical model to disentangle the mechanisms behind this effect when the marginal tax rate changes. Then, we obtain a proxy of tax evasion using a consumption-based approach at the household level using data for Chile. To identify the causal effect of income tax evasion, we use two advantages from the Chilean setting. First, it establishes equal marginal tax rates across self-employed and wage-earners isolating the evasion channel. Secondly, we exploit a marginal tax reform that affects agents given their pre-reform taxable income. We obtain two behavioral parameters using a difference-in-difference approach. Firstly, the elasticity of evasion to marginal tax rate equals 1.4. Also, we find that an increase of 1 percentage point in the evasion rate raises the probability of being self-employed by 6.1 percentage points, with a semi-elasticity of 0.16. We also show that the evasion channel explains 99.73% of the effect of taxes on self-employment decisions. Finally, we document that the deadweight loss associated with the tax reform is between 2.82 - 3.01% depending on the tax compliance policy. Moreover, we theoretically and empirically demonstrate that not considering evasion in this measure produces a biased estimation of the tax effect on welfare. The second chapter incorporates occupational decisions into the hierarchical model of Sanchez and Sobel (1993) to investigate distortions in tax policies design: the audit function, a linear marginal tax rate, and the IRS budget. In this economy, evasion is only possible in the self employment sector. The optimal audit is efficient below a cut-off level, and above this level, are equal to zero. This result is held under two extensions: the audit cost is monotonically nondecreasing in the self-employment wage, and the fine rate rises in self-employment wage but is bounded from above. The marginal tax rate is smaller than one, indicating that not considering occupational decisions produces an upward bias on taxes. The optimal IRS budget does not allow auditing the entire self-employment sector, but it is larger than the result from a cost-benefit analysis. Finally, differential taxation is optimal if the marginal tax rate in the self-employment sector is higher than the dependent sector. This result produces that the distortions in the optimal allocation of agents increase compared to an environment with one marginal tax rate.
Essays on economics of the family
(2023) Sierra Campodónico, Alejandro Carlos; Janiak, Alexandre; Lafortune, Jeanne; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
Mi trabajo aborda dos dimensiones de la economía de la familia: la elección de pareja y el papel de la violencia en las relaciones. En el primer capítulo, se explora la relación entre los métodos modernos de búsqueda de pareja, como las plataformas en línea, y el aumento de la homogamia en los Estados Unidos. Se descubre que los individuos considerados más atractivos, ya sea por su nivel de educación o edad, son menos propensos a utilizar métodos de búsqueda en línea. El modelo propuesto indica que métodos de búsqueda más eficientes pueden fomentar un mayor emparejamiento assortativo, lo cual podría resultar beneficioso bajo ciertas circunstancias. El segundo capítulo, coautorado con Alexandre Janiak y Jeanne Lafortune, analiza la compleja relación entre las leyes de divorcio más flexibles y la prevalencia de violencia en la pareja. El modelo teórico sugiere que la liberalización del divorcio puede tener un impacto mixto en los índices de violencia, dependiendo del contexto cultural y de la capacidad para realizar transferencias económicas entre los cónyuges. Este enfoque ofrece una visión más matizada y reconcilia hallazgos empíricos previos, contribuyendo a una comprensión más profunda de cómo las dinámicas legales y culturales afectan las relaciones familiares.
Essays on financial aspects of business cycles
(2023) Contreras Mualin, Gabriela Alejandra; Kohn, David; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
The first chapter explores how countries’ specialization in various commodities shapes the response of commodity exporters to global financial risk. Hard commodities, such as energy and metals, experience more substantial price declines than soft commodities. A panel SVAR analysis reveals that following an unexpected increase in global financial risk, hard commodity exporters experience a more significant decline in their commodity terms of trade, more than twice the increase in their sovereign spreads, and a larger drop in consumption and output. Motivated by this evidence, I build a small open economy model that captures the effects of global risk shocks on country spreads and how these effects depend on the type of commodities an economy exports. The model implications suggest that global risk shocks are primarily transmitted through commodity prices and that hard commodity exporters are hit harder not solely due to the composition of their exports. The second chapter investigates the interplay between firm size, cyclicality, and financial frictions using extensive Chilean firm-level data from 2008 to 2019. An innovative aspect of the empirical approach involves controlling for a new measure of firm productivity. The findings reveal substantial heterogeneity in how firms respond to aggregate economic fluctuations. When holding productivity constant, small firms display a more pronounced reaction in terms of investment, hiring, and sales to positive changes in GDP compared to larger firms. However, the link between cyclicality and firm size diminishes when considering firms with similar productivity and financial conditions, indicating that financial constraints play a crucial role in explaining the diverse responses across firms to aggregate economic fluctuations. These results support a financial accelerator mechanism, suggesting that, among equally productive firms, the higher cyclicality of smaller Chilean firms compared to larger ones is linked to differences in access to financing.

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