# Banco de México

• Cuauhtémoc, Mexico
Recent publications
Analizamos el Programa para el Bienestar de las Personas Adultas Mayores, cuyas reglas de operación fueron modificadas en el ejercicio fiscal 2019 (población objetivo y monto del apoyo). A través de las matrices de contabilidad social para las regiones norte, centro, centro norte y sur de México, simulamos los efectos expansivos y redistributivos de los cambios en el programa. Concluimos que la región centro es la más beneficiada, en comparación con el resto del país. No obstante, en la región sur se registra la mayor expansión en el ingreso de los más pobres.
This work studies the impact of Foreign Direct Investment and portfolio flows on house prices of emerging market economies using a static factors panel VARX model. The results show that an increase in both Foreign Direct Investment and portfolio flows leads to higher house prices but that portfolio flows have a more persistent effect. This work also finds that mortgage credit, as a proxy for residential investment, is an essential variable in house price dynamics because it has a higher positive impact than any of the other endogenous variables. The results are robust to different model specifications, such as adding additional lags or changing the order in which the endogenous variables enter the model.
Experiencing an extreme weather event and its consequences might make the risks associated with climate change more tangible, easier to evaluate, and more salient. Consequently, those experiences might translate into the adoption of pro-environmental behaviours. Understanding this relationship is fundamental for the successful design of policies aimed towards promoting the adoption of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures. This work contributes to the literature by showing that there is in fact a positive relation between experiencing an extreme weather event and willingness to take pro-environmental actions. The prevailing available evidence is for developed countries. Our empirical analysis is based on a nationally representative sample of households from Mexico, a developing country that is highly vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather events.
We document a substantial dispersion of interest margins charged by commercial banks across Chinese provinces. As our empirical study provides evidence that resource costs are the primary drivers of Chinese bank interest margins, we build a parsimonious dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model that captures this feature. Our analysis suggests that productivity differentials in the banking industry among Chinese provinces are substantial. Banks in less developed provinces adopt more labor-intensive technologies that enable them to smooth the impact of productivity shocks. The adoption of a common nationwide banking technology would cause substantial increases in financial costs and amplify the volatility of macroeconomic fluctuations across provinces.
Results of previous studies of the relationship between bank competition and bank risk-taking have differed in findings but most have used the same sort of barriers to perfect competition, such as entry barriers and differences in bank default risk. This study suggests that banks that compete more effectively in the deposit market using nonprice features such as differences in services and advertising gain market power and such market power gives them incentives to take less risk. Banks that compete less effectively take more risk. Empirical evidence supports the predictions of the model.
Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is a heterogeneous group of arthritis of autoimmune aetiology. Systemic-onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis (soJIA) presents with fever, transient erythematous rash, hepatomegaly, splenomegaly, lymphadenopathy, and serositis. SoJIA presents multiple complications, and the most severe is the macrophage activation syndrome (MAS); the timely treatment of MAS must be established early and aggressively to avoid a fatal outcome. Therapeutic plasma exchange has anecdotally been used in refractory cases. A 66-month-old male with a 1-year illness characterized by evening-predominant, intermittent fever, adenomegalies, urticarial-like rash, arthralgia, and arthritis. Biochemical analysis revealed anaemia, leukocytosis, neutrophilia, hypertriglyceridemia, hyperferritinemia, and hypofibrinogenemia; bone marrow aspirate showed hemophagocytosis. He was diagnosed with SoJIA complicated with MAS. He received multiple treatments with IV human gammaglobulin, cyclosporine, dexamethasone, and tocilizumab without improvement. Plasma replacement treatment was performed. Afterwards, he presented significant improvement. After 3-year-follow-up, he remains in good general condition. We present a refractory case of soJIA complicated with MAS successfully treated with plasma exchange.
We analyze the effect on poverty of a significant increase in the minimum wage using a quasi-experimental situation in Mexico. In January 2019, the Mexican government announced an increase in the minimum wage: in most of the country it increased by 16 per cent, while in 43 municipalities along the U.S. border it increased by 100 per cent. Using household surveys and the official method for calculating labor income poverty, we implement difference-in-difference and synthetic control methodologies to estimate whether this policy affected poverty in Mexico. We find that poverty along the border decreased by 2.6–3.0 percentage points (11–13 per cent) due to the larger increase in the minimum wage. Poverty was reduced mainly by reducing the flow from non-poverty into poverty. However, poverty intensity increased, mainly because the policy did not affect the share of families without labor income among the poorest households.
Using price data from the lower 48 states, we find that regional natural gas market in the US has become less integrated since the rise of shale production. Price pairs for those states with significant shale production, as well as for major consumption states, show a particularly high reduction in integration. However, the degree of integration has stabilized in recent years, especially after 2016. For state pairs with integrated prices, we show that it takes longer to correct any disequilibrium from the long-run price relationship during the shale boom, indicating slower information transmission. Pipeline capacity and distances play a key role in determining information transmission throughout the sample period, while production, consumption, and storage levels have become more important in recent years. The analysis suggests significant welfare gains from efforts to improve natural gas market integration, such as pipeline and storage capacity expansion projects.
En contraste con otros países, en México no existe una encuesta para medir numéricamente las expectativas de inflación de los consumidores. En este trabajo se reportan los resultados de la aplicación de un cuestionario simple que pretende obtener una primera aproximación de dichas perspectivas. El ejercicio también busca conseguir información sobre el proceso de formación de expectativas mediante una intervención controlada, así como indagar qué productos influyen más en éstas. Se formaron cuatro grupos de manera aleatoria: tres que recibían información sobre la inflación pasada, presente o esperada, y un grupo de control sin información adicional. En consistencia con la literatura, los resultados muestran que las personas tienen una expectativa de inflación mayor que los especialistas. El experimento también revela que otorgar información sí las afecta y reduce. Finalmente, encontramos que las expectativas de inflación dependen principalmente de productos de consumo cotidiano, como los alimentos.
We develop threshold estimation methods for panel data models with two threshold variables and individual fixed specific effects covering short time periods. In the static panel data model, we propose least squares estimation of the threshold and regression slopes using fixed effects transformations; while in the dynamic panel data model, we propose maximum likelihood estimation of the threshold and slope parameters using first difference transformations. In both models, we propose to estimate the threshold parameters sequentially. We apply the methods to a 15-year sample of 565 U.S. firms to test whether financial constraints affect investment decisions.
The COVID-19 crisis has been, above all, a tragic public health crisis. It has entailed an enormous effort to respond to the demand for health services. In it, fiscal authorities have led the economic policy responses. For their part, central banks responded swiftly by easing their monetary stance and implementing facilities to provide liquidity and enable the credit in the economy. We discuss key economic issues of the central bank response, in which the monetary authorities have had to account for the crisis’ nature. We reason that the actions taken by central bank in general avoided a further deterioration of economic conditions.
Study comparing ABO blood group distribution between pregnant women with or without COVID‐19. Blood group ABO did not affect COVID‐19 susceptibility, severity, or death.
First, we give a detailed review of two algorithms that solve the minimization case of the assignment problem, the Bertsekas auction algorithm and the Goldberg & Kennedy algorithm. It was previously alluded that both algorithms are equivalent. We give a detailed proof that these algorithms are equivalent. Also, we perform experimental results comparing the performance of three algorithms for the assignment problem: the $$\epsilon$$-scaling auction algorithm, the Hungarian algorithm and the FlowAssign algorithm. The experiment shows that the auction algorithm still performs and scales better in practice than the other algorithms which are harder to implement and have better theoretical time complexity.
This paper investigates the relationship between expansionary credit events and firms’ employment decisions. To overcome the endogeneity coming from the supply side of credit we exploited the legal and political framework in Mexico to examine the effects of local governments’ prepayment of loans, a situation that leads banks to channel newfound liquidity in firms. Analysis of a novel data set covering a 10-year period showed that a 1-standard-deviation increase in the issuance of new loans increases firms’ employment by 2.57 percentage points. Timing of the boost in employment varies, with smaller firms reacting immediately and larger firms reacting four months later. The effects are driven by firms in the manufacturing sector. Our results highlight the importance of the bank lending channel to stimulate employment in the short term, especially for smaller firms. Further, our estimates suggest that the effect of credit on employment could be amplified with policies that promote a more competitive corporate loan market.
We introduce the concept of codeterminantal graphs, which generalize the concepts of cospectral and coinvariant graphs. To do this, we investigate the relationship of the spectrum and the Smith normal form (SNF) with the determinantal ideals. We establish a necessary and sufficient condition for graphs to be codeterminantal on R[x], and we present some computational results on codeterminantal graphs up to 9 vertices. Finally, we show that complete graphs and star graphs are determined by the SNF of its distance Laplacian matrix.
Gender stereotypes, the assumptions concerning appropriate social roles for men and women, permeate the labor market. Analyzing information from over 2.5 million job advertisements on three different employment search websites in Mexico, exploiting approximately 235,00 that are explicitly gender-targeted, we find evidence that advertisements seeking “communal” characteristics, stereotypically associated with women, specify lower salaries than those seeking “agentic” characteristics, stereotypically associated with men. Given the use of gender-targeted advertisements in Mexico, we use a random forest algorithm to predict whether non-targeted ads are in fact directed toward men or women, based on the language they use. We find that the non-targeted ads for which we predict gender show larger salary gaps (8–35 percent) than explicitly gender-targeted ads (0–13 percent). If women are segregated into occupations deemed appropriate for their gender, this pay gap between jobs requiring communal versus agentic characteristics translates into a gender pay gap in the labor market.