Research
Published papers
Education and financial frictions: firm-level interactions and macroeconomic implications (joint with Pedro Gomes and Zoe Kuehn) (The Economic Journal, https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/uead098)
CAF Working Paper Series (Research Department working papers 1515, CAF Development Bank Of Latinamerica)
Capital-skill complementarity in production implies non-trivial interactions between the availability of human capital and financial constraints for firms. Firms that are constrained in their access to finance hire a lower proportion of skilled labor than unconstrained firms. Furthermore, a lack of skilled workers leads to higher skilled wages, reducing firms' desired capital intensity and thus lessening the effective financial constraint faced by firms. We build an occupational-choice-model to quantify the importance of financial frictions and availability of skilled labor, as well as their joint effects to explain cross-country differences in aggregate output per capita, productivity, average firm size and college premium. We find that in countries with a negligible share of tertiary educated workers, financial liberalizations have very small effects on aggregate output.
Asymmetric Effects of Trade and FDI: The role of country size and Bridge Multinational Production (joint with Nicolás Aragón) European Economic Review, Volume 160, November 2023.
Economics Working Papers MWP2015/16, European University Institute)
Gains from trade in goods stem from three channels: (i) trade, (ii) domestic multinational production (DMP), and (iii) bridge multinational production (BMP). We develop a quantitative theory to measure the effects of trade barriers and country size on the gains from openness through each of these channels. We show that these are sensitive to country size and larger in Europe than in South America (i.e larger in countries with low barriers). Country size is a crucial determinant of the contribution of each of these channels to the total gains from openness: smaller countries gain more. DMP is more important in large countries, whereas the BMP channel is more important in small countries.
Financial Frictions, Occupational Choice and Economic Inequality (joint with Andrés Erosa), Journal of Monetary Economics, ISSN: 0304-3932, Vol: 107, Page: 63-76
The Lucas (1978) model is extended to incorporate heterogeneity in working ability and a time allocation decision by entrepreneurs (work versus manage). Financial frictions distort not only the average skill of entrepreneurs but also the average skill of workers. The model economy accounts for half of the association between entrepreneurship and external finance to GDP in the data, whereas a standard span of control model explains only about one tenth. The variation in entrepreneurship is mostly due to the variation in self-employed entrepreneurs rather than in employers. Moreover, financial frictions have larger effects on output per worker, TFP, and inequality.
Work in progress
Constrained Efficient Entrepreneurship (joint with Raül Santaulàlia-Llopis and Yu Zheng) (preliminary draft upon request)
Financial Frictions and Firms' Financial Relationship (joint with Hernán Seoane)
Informality, Occupational Choice and Investments in Human Capital (joint with Lucila Berniell)
Financial Frictions and Entrepreneurship: The Role of Consumption Taxation (joint with Andrés Erosa)
Participation in CAF publications:
Reporte de Economía y Desarrollo 2018: "Instituciones para la productividad: hacia un mejor entorno empresarial". español inglés
Reporte de Economía y Desarrollo 2020: "Los sistemas de pensiones y salud en América Latina. Los desafíos del envejecimiento, el cambio tecnológico y la informalidad". español inglés
Reporte de Economía y Desarrollo 2021 (editor): "Caminos para la integración: facilitación del comercio, infraestructura y cadenas globales de valor". español