Research

Fear of crime has been rising persistently in Chile, even in periods where actual crime rates have decreased, making the perception of crime an important policy issue. This paper presents the results of the impact evaluation of a pilot public policy designed to reduce fear of crime around a shopping centre in Santiago, Chile. The pilot policy consisted of installing a team including police officers and local government officials that handed out information leaflets and talked to passers-by about crime prevention. Pre-intervention and post-intervention surveys were conducted in the shopping centre where the programme was implemented and in a control shopping centre nearby to identify the causal effects of the policy using a difference-in-differences empirical strategy. The results indicate that the programme was effective in reducing fear of crime around the shopping centre, especially at night among its workers, and that it reduced actual crime. However, a deeper analysis suggests that the programme might have actually increased fear of crime among the individuals who directly interacted with the programme. The reduction in crime might have indirectly resulted in an overall reduction in fear among workers, who are likely to be up to date on criminal occurrences in the area, explaining how an increase in fear in those directly contacted is consistent with an overall reduction in fear across workers.

Marshallian externalities are the benefits obtained by a sector due to geographical agglomeration, and Jacobian effects are spillovers related to the novel combinations that can occur in cities with diversified economic activities. This paper argues that most of the quantitative literature on creative industries is asking whether they are a source of Marshallian or Jacobian effects, inasmuch as a stronger creative sector is a direction of diversification that is likely to have positive spillovers to the rest of the economy. Exploring both questions under a common framework, the results are consistent with the existence of Marshallian but not of Jacobian effects, which calls to caution when making policy suggestions regarding the sector. The degree of specialization in creative sectors is associated with higher sales and a higher number of rms in those sectors, albeit at a decreasing rate. A similar relationship is found for specialization in creative occupations and the incomes of those workers. Though there is no evidence of spillovers from creative industries in general to the rest of the economy, analyses at a more disaggregated level could produce different results and useful insights for policy.

We study the effect of different types of barriers to innovation (financial, demand, knowledge, market, cooperation and regulatory barriers) on firm level innovation inputs and outputs. Using a pooled sample of three Chilean innovation surveys, based on an instrumental variable approach, we find that the probability of generating innovation outcomes is significantly reduced by demand and financial barriers. Regarding inputs for innovation, we find a clear negative relationship between financial and demand obstacles and the propensity to inccur in (non-R&D) innovation expenditure, but not with its intensity. Our results are reinforced by matching and panel fixed-effects estimators. We also provide evidence of heterogeneous effects across firm size and sectors, finding that financial obstacles are specially relevant for mid-sized firms, and demand barriers, although pervasive for all firm sizes, particularly impact large firms. Larger firms, albeit declaring lower restrictions to innovate, also face significant knowledge obstacles. On the other hand, market structure obstacles have a negative effect only on small firms. We also find a particular strong effect of demand and finance barriers in mining and knowledge barriers impacting manufacturing. Demand and financial obstacles appear to dominate other concerns for innovation across the board. 

The energy transition will significantly increase demand for minerals. This might create new economic opportunities for lower-income countries with resources, but it will also augment local social and environmental problems associated with the sector. The increasing number of social and environmental conflicts associated with mining in emerging economies is a manifestation of this tension and raises questions about just energy transitions. But can mining be done in more sustainable ways? Transition studies have been largely silent on this question. In this article, we urge transitions scholars to incorporate mining into their analyses of energy transitions and briefly mention possible starting points to move in this direction.

When a sector suffers a reduction in the demand for its products, its suppliers are also affected. This paper shows that when demand for a product falls, there is a decline in the number of domestic plants producing inputs for that good. This result is obtained using data from Chilean manufacturing during the 1995–2006 period, using the increase in Chinese penetration as a demand shock. Using plant-product level data, I find that the observed effect on the number of suppliers is explained by multi-product plants dropping varieties, especially small plants, low-productivity plants and low-markup varieties. This is an intuitive but previously unobserved network effect through which import competition may have a productivity-enhancing effect.

I study how the number of categories exported by countries is related to the level and the volatility of the exchange rate. I find that export variety is positively related to a weaker exchange rate and negatively related to its volatility. These relationships seem stronger for goods with higher technological intensity.

Using data for a long panel of countries, I investigate these relationships using a methodology that allows for heterogeneous coefficients across countries and discuss two sources of bias that are often overlooked.

We study the determinants of the survival of new export products of multi-product firms. We use micro-level data from Chile to estimate linear fixed effects and nonlinear survival models to show that a measure of `distance' between a firm's new export and its previous export basket is a negative and significant determinant of the survival of the new export, especially during its first year. Our interpretation of this finding is that exports further away from firms' core competences have lower chances of survival in exports since it is more difficult for firms to achieve competitiveness in them. Our results suggest that country-level diversification, at least through existing firms, should be gradual.