El impacto de la privatización del sector eléctrico en la salud pública

Este informe utiliza información a nivel provincial en Argentina para probar la relación casual entre la distribución de electricidad y la salud. Examina el impacto de la privatización en dos medidas: incidencia en los índices de nacimientos de bajo peso y mortalidad infantil causada por envenenamiento de comida. La privatizacion mejora la cobertura del servicio que, a través del uso de refrigeradoras puede mejorar la ración nutricional. La privatización también tiene por resultado la reducción en la frecuencia de interrupciones eléctricas, y así reducir la probabilidad del envenenamiento de la comida. A pesar que la evidencia indica que la privatización reduce el índice de nacimientos de bajo peso y mortalidad infantil causados por el envenenamiento de la comida, los resultados no son lo suficientemente fuertes para enriquecer el debate de políticasrespecto a los beneficios de la privatización para el bienestar de los pobres.

Ageing, Government Budgets, Retirement, and Growth

We analyze the short and long run effects of demographic ageing—increased longevity and reduced fertility—on per-capita growth. The OLG model captures direct effects, working through adjustments in the savings rate, labor supply, and capital deepening, and indirect effects, working through changes of taxes, government spending components and the retirement age in politico-economic equilibrium. Growth is driven by capital accumulation and productivity increases fueled by public investment. The closed-form solutions of the model predict taxation and the retirement age in OECD economies to increase in response to demographic ageing and per-capita growth to accelerate. If the retirement age were held constant, the growth rate in politico-economic equilibrium would essentially remain unchanged, due to a surge of social security transfers and crowding out of public investment.ageing, government budgets, retirement, growth

Economic and Politico-Economic Equivalence of Fiscal Policies

We extend “economic equivalence” results, like the Ricardian equivalence proposition, to the political sphere where policy is chosen sequentially. We derive conditions under which a policy regime (summarizing admissible policy choices in every period) and a state are “politico-economically equivalent” to another such pair, in the sense that both pairs give rise to the same equilibrium allocation. We apply the conditions in the context of politico-economic theories of government debt as a means to i) deliver intergenerational transfers or ii) smooth tax distortions. We find that certain politico-economic models of social security or variants thereof can be re-interpreted as novel politico-economic theories of debt while other models cannot, possibly explaining the political conflict surrounding social security reform. We also find that in environments with distorting taxes, economic equivalence relations between policies with different levels of debt do not extend to the political sphere.equivalence, social security, government debt, social security reform

Sustaining Social Security

This paper analyzes the sustainability of intergenerational transfers in politico-economic equilibrium. Embedding electoral competition for the votes of old and young households in the standard Diamond (1965) OLG model, we find that intergenerational transfers naturally arise in a Markov perfect equilibrium, even in the absence of altruism, commitment, or trigger strategies. Not internalizing the negative effects of transfers for future generations, the political process partially resolves the distributive conflict between old and young voters by shifting some of the cost of social security to the unborn. As a consequence, transfers in politico-economic equilibrium are higher than what is socially optimal. Standard functional form assumptions yield closed-form solutions for the politico-economic equilibrium as well as the equilibrium supported by the Ramsey policy. The model predicts population ageing to lead to larger social security systems, but eventually lower benefits per retiree. Under realistic parameter values, it predicts a social-security tax rate close to the actual one, but higher than the Ramsey tax rate. Closed-form solutions for the case with endogenous labor supply, tax distortions, and multiple policy instruments prove the results to be robust.social security, intergenerational transfers, probabilistic voting, Markov perfect equilibrium, saving, labor supply

Ageing, Government Budgets, Retirement, and Growth

We analyze the short and long run effects of demographic ageing—increased longevity and reduced fertility—on per-capita growth. The OLG model captures direct effects, working through adjustments in the savings rate, labor supply, and capital deepening, and indirect effects, working through changes of taxes, government spending components and the retirement age in politico-economic equilibrium. Growth is driven by capital accumulation and productivity increases fueled by public investment. The closed-form solutions of the model predict taxation and the retirement age in OECD economies to increase in response to demographic ageing and per-capita growth to accelerate. If the retirement age were held constant, the growth rate in politico-economic equilibrium would essentially remain unchanged, due to a surge of social security transfers and crowding out of public investment.

Business Cycle and Macroeconomic Policy Coordination in MERCOSUR

The paper analyzes cyclical comovements in the Mercosur area differentiating idiosyncratic from common shocks. In the Mercosur (or any region for that matter) shocks can be country-specific, affecting only one country or a specific set of countries (for example, a weather-related shock, a domestic policy shock); or they can be common to the entire region (for example, a change in the conditions in international capital markets or a world recession). Propagation mechanisms, in turn, are important because a shock that was initially country-specific, originating in one country, might eventually spillover to others. We build on the unobserved component approach to decompose the Mercosur countries real GDP (seasonally adjusted) fluctuations into these three components and compare them with previous results. The main findings in the paper are: first, common factors originating in impulses stemming from changes in investor’s sentiment are relevant to explaining regional output comovements and the spillover effects between neighbors are significant. Second, volatility matters, and matters especially in the case of recent regional agreements. Supply shocks in Mercosur countries tend to be larger than in the US and European countries. Third, finance matters for both volatility and output/price dynamics. Accelerator effects may be important in explaining some features of the output/price dynamics that the standard models based on vector autoregression techniques are unable to account for..

Which could be the role of Hybrid Fibre Coax in Next Generation Access networks?

Next generation access networks (NGAN) will support a renewed communication structure where opportunities lie in the provision of ubiquitous broadband connectivity, a wide variety of new applications, appealing contents and a general support to the sustainable growth of diverse sectors. From their deployment it is expected a wealth of innovations, jobs creation and a new wave of economic growth. In this paper we discuss which could be the role of Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) in the Next Generation Access Network (NGAN) roadmap. Thus, we propose a simplified model for making approximate cost calculations for HFC deployment based on the geographic and sociodemographic characteristics of Spain. Considering the latest evolution of HFC based on DOCSIS 3.0 from integrated (I-CMTS) towards modular (M-CMTS), the results from the model are compared with the most competitive NGAN for ultrabroadband speeds: Fibre to the Home (FTTH) based on Gigabitcapable Passive Optical Networks (GPON

Fairy tales revisited and transformed : Anne Sexton's critique of social(ized) femininity

Este artículo es una lectura feminista de algunos poemas incluidos en Transformations, libro publicado por Anne Sexton en 1971. Se puede observar una conciencia de género en esta re-escritura de los cuentos de hadas tradicionales, si bien es cierto que Sexton no era quizás consciente del alcance ideológico que se atisbaba en estos\ud cuentos transformados. Mi principal propósito es el de poner de manifiesto la actitud critica que Sexton despliega al escribir estas versiones satíricas en tanto en cuanto el carácter androcéntrico y sexista de los discursos latentes en las versiones originales se muestra diáfanamente. Sus textos cuestionan la asociación patriarcal de la mujer con nociones tales como inocencia, humildad, sumisión, dulzura, obediencia, sacrificio, etc. Simultáneamente, proponen también la consideración de las figuras de "Blancanieves", "Cenicienta" y "Rapunzel" como estereotipos femeninos que ponen en práctica, voluntaria o involuntariamente, las demandas de la cultura patriarcal. Empleando una agudeza sarcástica y genio paródico ausentes en la gran mayoría de sus volúmenes precedentes, Sexton reconstruye los cuentos de los hermanos Grimm probablemente como resultado de preocupaciones personales que se hacen eco, no obstante, de situaciones vividas por otras mujeres y que, dramatizadas aquí, ponen al descubierto las formas en que la cultura dominante aparece inscrita en relación con la forma de abordar la política sexual

A New Test for the Success of Inflation Targeting

We propose a new test, derived from a set of variance decompositions of a structural VAR, for the success of inflation targeting. In contrast to standard sacrifice ratios this test considers changes in the structure of real and nominal shocks; second moment effects. We find strong support for IT with 7 of the 9 countries in our sample having negative “sacrifices” and many countries with “benefits”. However, we also find very different performances across IT countries. We find that “IT success” depends on the size of the real shocks suffered but controlling for this there are differences in country performance.

“Why You Always So Political?”: A Counterstory About Educational-Environmental Racism at a Predominantly White University

Using critical race counterstorytelling, I tell a story about the experiences of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx (MMAX) undergraduate students at private, historically and predominantly white university in the Northeast. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observations, pláticas, document analyses, and literature on race and space and racism in higher education, I argue that the racially hostile campus environment experienced by MMAX students at their respective university manifests itself as a form of educational-environmental racism. Through narrated dialogue, Aurora (a composite character) and I delve into a critical conversation about how educational-environmental racism is experienced by MMAX students through a racialized landscape in the following ways: 1) Discriminatory Objects and Symbols on Campus; 2) Glorification of Historical Trauma; and 3) Lack of Physical Representation and Cultural Deprivation