Estudios de Economía

The quantum harmonic oscillator expected shortfall model

2023-12-18T21:05:51+00:00

This paper presents a new Expected Shortfall (ES) model based on the Quantum Harmonic Oscillator (QHO). It is used to estimate market risk in banks and other financial institutions according to Basel III standard. Predictions of the model agree with the empirical data which displays deviations from normality. Using backtesting, it is shown that the model can be reliably used to assess market risk.

Much ado about nothing: A failed case for banning combustion vehicles

2023-12-18T21:16:16+00:00

The Balearic Islands (Spain) passed a regional law in 2019 banning the registration of diesel and petrol vehicles from 1 January 2025 and 1 January 2035, respectively. This law was heavily criticised before and during its implementation and was finally abolished after six months. This paper analyses the effect of this law on the registrations of both types of vehicles, as well as the registration of non-polluting vehicles. Both the synthetic control method and the difference-in-difference estimator show that the ban had no impact on any type of vehicle, not even on those that are non-polluting. Although the Balearic Islands’ regional government sought to pioneer implementation of this policy, the incorrect specification of the law, the uncertainty surrounding its approval and its short-term effects and may have reduced its effectiveness.

Policy response to COVID-19 shock: measuring policy impacts on lending interest rates with granular data

2023-12-18T21:21:11+00:00

As a response to the COVID-19 shock, the Uruguayan government expanded an existing public credit guarantee and introduced deductions in local currency reserve requirements. Policies of the same nature were also implemented by several governments throughout the world. This paper contributes to the financial additionality literature and the literature on the bank lending view of the monetary policy by analyzing the impact of this type of policies on loans’ interest rate spread over the interbank rate. Using a very detailed database on loan contracts, we estimate a dynamic panel model to analyze the effects of policy responses to the COVID-19 shock over loan interest rates. We find that the PCG policy had a relatively higher effect on loans’ interest rates in comparison to the reserve requirements policy.

Exploring gender differences in labor markets from the perspective of the task based approach

2023-12-18T21:26:35+00:00

Using households survey microdata from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, we characterize changes in employment and wages between the mid-2000s and the late-2010s emphasizing the gender dimension from the viewpoint of the task-based approach. We employ surveys from PIAAC-OECD to study the task content of jobs and create an index of routine task content (RTC) of occupations. We document five facts: (i) The proportion of routine tasks is currently higher for women than for men. (ii) The employment structure is considerably more biased towards high-RTC jobs in Latin America than in OECD countries, for both genders. (iii) There was an increase in the employment participation of low-RTC jobs during the period under study, mainly driven by movements in the occupational structure of women, especially the young and middle-aged. (iv) Wage gains were relatively higher in high-RTC occupations, with this pattern more pronounced for men than for women. (v) While there was a modest reduction in the gender wage gap, the decline was stronger in computer-intensive occupations.

The effect of innovation on employment: Mexico and Ecuador

2023-12-18T21:32:27+00:00

This work provides evidence of the effect of innovation on employment in two countries where this impact has not been previously analysed: Mexico and Ecuador. Following the method proposed by Harrison et al. (2014), we find that introducing new products in the market positively affects employment in Mexico and Ecuador. While process innovation tends to destroy jobs in Mexico, it has no effect in the case of Ecuador. The positive impact of product innovation is observed to be greater than the loss of employment caused by process innovation.

Direct and Indirect Impacts of Oil Price Shocks on Ecuador’s Economic Cycles (2000:01-2020:01)

2023-12-18T21:36:49+00:00

We analyse the non-linear relationship between oil price shocks and the real business cycle in Ecuador, a dollarized economy where oil exports are the country’s main source of foreign exchange. We estimate several autoregressive Markov switching models for the period 2000:01-2020:01 to identify the differentiated impact of nominal oil price shocks on real GDP in expansion and slowdown regimes. We find evidence that oil price shocks have an asymmetric effect on Ecuador’s economic growth, with a larger impact during slowdowns. They also affect all components of aggregate demand differently in each regime, with a larger impact on investment during expansions.