(with Vanessa Alviarez, Matias Busso, Philip Keefer, and Cezar Santos)

Latin America and the Caribbean has made major social and macroeconomic strides, yet growth and productivity remain weak. Markets for Development: Improving Lives through Competition argues that the regions core challenge is limited market competition. High market concentration, regulatory barriers, and weak enforcement of rules allow dominant firms to restrict entry, innovation, and opportunity. This book presents new evidence on how market power shapes firm behavior, employment, and inequality across sectors. It also demonstrates that reducing fragmentation, improving regulation, and strengthening competition policy can lower prices for consumers, raise productivity, create better jobs, and build fiscal capacity, making competition a central driver of development.

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(with Gustavo Crespi, María Paula Gerardino, Edwin Goñi Pacchioni, Oscar Mitnik, and Christian Volpe Martincus), Inter-American Development Bank, 2024.

This publication is one of a series of five monographs produced by the Inter-American Development Bank to take stock of the lessons learned from impact evaluations of investments supported by the IDB Group for over a decade across a wide range of economic and social development sectors. This monograph studies the impact of productive sector programs and policies to support workers, private firms, and entrepreneurs, and to promote trade and investment. It presents key lessons on “what works” to increase productivity, including providing training to workers and entrepreneurs, increasing access to credit, promoting entrepreneurship with potential for growth, extending innovation and technology, improving efficiency through the agglomeration of firms, and taking steps to facilitate trade and investment. 

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(with Carlo Pietrobelli and Alessandro Maffioli), Inter-American Development Bank, 2016.

Do cluster development programs work? Do they fundamentally encourage the essential inter-firm linkages and coordination? Do they lead to innovation and productivity, enterprise development, larger employment, and export growth, and if so, after how long? Do other firms benefit from these programs? This book offers insight into quantitative methods that help answer these questions. Cluster development is a form of modern industrial policy that is spreading across the world to help exploit the externalities emerging from geographical agglomeration and inter-firm coordination. Therefore, rigorous impact evaluations are necessary because they help policymakers understand better ways to design future programs and provide accountability for public resources. The chapters argue that enterprise clusters and the programs to support them are diverse and multidimensional processes that require a variety of instruments to be fully understood and assessed. The book as a whole gathers various methodological essays and quantitative tests of complementary tools and approaches, emphasizing their usefulness and effectiveness in coordination with one another. Most importantly, it asserts that policy evaluation is crucial, in particular when it comes to cluster development programs, to ensure the best use of public resources, the accountability of beneficiaries, and most of all to feed the necessary learning to improve the design and implementation of public policies for enterprise development.

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