Competitive collaboration and market contestability: cases in Mexican and UK banking, 1945-75

In this article we explore the emergence and evolution of collaboration agreements among different types of intermediaries in the UK and Mexican financial systems. Collaboration in the UK looks at agreements between non-bank and non-finance providers aiming to modify their competitive capabilities and circumvent barriers to enter deposit markets. Collaboration in Mexican banking considered agreements between commercial banks and small regional banks during the period of 1945 to 1975. Agreements in Mexican banking are benchmarked against collaboration in the UK. As a result, research in this article sheds light on the success of collaboration agreements through changes in competitive strength rather than the longevity of the transaction or the formality and structural visibility of the agreements. Evidence documented here also helps in remedying a shortage of research around financial institutions in less developed countries and the economic and business history of Latin America, while providing an international comparison.     

Labor Informality: Choice or Sign of Segmentation? A Quantile Regression Approach at the Regional Level for Colombia

The labor market in developing countries is remarkably heterogeneous, with a small productive formal sector characterized by high wages and attractive employment conditions, and a large informal sector characterized by low productivity and volatile wages. The informal sector is particularly diverse. In this paper, we examine the heterogeneity of the informal sector at the regional level in Colombia. In general, our findings suggest that both voluntary and involuntary informal employment co‐exist by choice and as a consequence of labor market segmentation. We also find that there are striking differences in labor market characteristics across cities, particularly with respect to informal employment.     

A fair rule in minimum cost spanning tree problems

We study minimum cost spanning tree problems and define a cost sharing rule that satisfies many more properties than other rules in the literature. Furthermore, we provide an axiomatic characterization based on monotonicity properties.     

The relative contributions of private information sharing and public information releases to information aggregation

We calculate learning rates when agents are informed through public and private observation of other agents' actions. We characterize the evolution of the distribution of posterior beliefs. If the private learning channel is present, convergence of the distribution of beliefs to the perfect-information limit is exponential at a rate equal to the sum of the mean arrival rate of public information and the mean rate at which individual agents are randomly matched with other agents. If, however, there is no private information sharing, then convergence is exponential at a rate strictly lower than the mean arrival rate of public information.     

Recent decline in wage inequality and formalization of the labour market in Argentina

Labour market conditions improved during the 2000s in Latin America, a process that included a reduction in the magnitude of informal employment. A decline of wage inequality was another feature of this period. Both dynamics were particularly intense in Argentina. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the role played by the process of formalization of the labour market that occurred in Argentina during that period on the reduction of income inequality, while additionally taking into account other factors that might have also contributed to such dynamics of income inequality. The method employed is a decomposition proposed by Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux, which allows extending the Oaxaca-Blinder approach to decompose some distributive statistics of income between a ‘composition effect’ and a ‘returns effect’. The study concludes that the process of increasing labour market formalization had an equalizing effect over the period, a finding that had not been emphasized in previous studies.     

Afro‐descendants in Peru: Do beauty and race matter in the labor market?

This is a first study about labor discrimination against Afro‐descendants in Peru. We randomly assigned Afro‐Peruvian and white surnames and photographs (subjectively beautiful, homely looking, or not photos) to 3,828 fictitious résumés, sent for unskilled, technical, and professional occupations. We find an unprecedented, sizeable beauty premium in unskilled occupations (232.5 percent), no effect of looks in technical occupations, and a beauty penalty in professional occupations (–71.3 percent). Overall, whites receive 19.37 percent more callbacks than similarly qualified Afro‐Peruvians; this racial discrimination affects only Afro‐Peruvian females, and particularly those employed in technical occupations. These results remain unaltered when we restrict the sample to those markedly “Afro” surnames. Our findings unveil different dynamics of discrimination across job categories, which tend to be overlooked by the existing literature.     

Additivity in bankruptcy problems and in allocation problems

We study the property of additivity in bankruptcy problems and in allocation problems. In bankruptcy problems we use this property to characterize the Talmudic rule proposed by Rabbi Ibn Ezra. Moreover we generalize this rule to every bankruptcy problem. Again, using additivity we characterize the rights egalitarian solution in allocation problems.