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Fuente: COES 2010
Fuente: MPRA Paper
I analyze the effect of an unexpected influx of immigrants on the price of skill and hence on the earnings, human capital accumulation, and educational attainment of native workers. In order to study these effects, I develop a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous workers who differ in their level of skill and in their ability to learn new skills. These workers accumulate human capital optimally using information about the current and future market price of skill to guide their decisions. To assess the impact of immigration, I compare simulated earnings in the presence of immigration with a series of counterfactual experiments. My findings suggest that immigration has a small negative direct effect on earnings, but a positive and relatively large impact indirectly through human capital accumulation and educational attainment. This latter mechanism explains 60% of the variations in earnings caused by immigration.
Fuente: IDB Working Paper Series Nº IDB-WP-772
Using data from the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey, this paper explores the determinants of firms’ training decisions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The share of production for the export market and the size of the firm are key factors; training programs are not prevalent in all sectors. In addition, the share of workers receiving training depends on the age of the firm, and only for non-productive workers are differences observed across sectors. More detailed data from a Longitudinal Enterprise Survey in Chile are used to corroborate these findings. It is found that the percentage of workers receiving training is low and that the extensive and intensive margins of training are affected by different sets of firm characteristics. Finally, the results of a qualitative study in Chile suggest that training is mostly introduced to comply with certifications and standards imposed by domestic and foreign authorities. Training in larger firms may also be oriented to improve the work environment.
Fuente: Central Bank of Chile Working Papers
During the 1990’s the world experienced a new wave of regional integration agreements (RIAs) that reached unprecedented proportions. In the presence of economies of scale or extent-of-the market effects RIAs may have positive growth effects. I introduce a new measure of regional integration by interacting country membership to a RIA and the partners’ share of world GDP, which allows capturing differentiated effects depending on the size of the partners. Results indicate that RIAs have exerted positive effects on growth. In addition, I find that North North agreements have significant growth effects; South-South agreements have ambiguous effects depending on the size of the countries joining them, and that there is no clear answer for North-South agreements.
Fuente: IZA Discussion Paper No. 11452
There is a consensus in the literature on the relevance of the first 1,000 days since conception in the development of a child’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills. However, little is known of the determinants of these skills at that age, as previous literature has focused on the effect of in utero and early childhood shocks on outcomes at birth or at age 7 and beyond. In this paper, we analyze the impact of prenatal stress on cognitive and non-cognitive development of the child by age 2. By exploiting a longitudinal dataset of children and their parents, we find that children who were exposed in-utero to maternal stress do not have different birth-weight relative to those who were not exposed, yet by age 2, exposed children had a lower level of development, cognition skills, and more attention problems relative to children not exposed to in utero stress.We also find that the negative impacts are observed if in-utero stress occurs during the first trimester of pregnancy. The negative impact on cognitive skills and development is concentrated on lower-income children and attention problems occur among high-income children, and boys suffer lower development and worse attention problems, while girls’ cognition is negatively affected by in-utero stress.
In regions whose industrial structure is organized around one or more large firm corporations, the best practices of small and medium enterprises depend on where firms are located in the supply chain. This paper studies 351 small and medium enterprises in the Antofagasta Region in Chile between 2007 and 2008, where multinational and public mining companies are the drivers of the local economy and the government is promoting the formation of a mining cluster. Structural equation model is used to show that first-tier small and medium enterprise mining suppliers, directly related to large corporations, follow business practices that promote international certification, quality control, and investment in innovation, while in contrast second-tier small and medium enterprises are more focused on avoiding insolvency and client orientation. These results cast doubt on the formation of a mining cluster in the region and suggest the need for differentiated policies in these two groups of small and medium enterprises, especially those related to knowledge transfer.
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