Andrés Gómez-Lobo

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of Chile

We examine three dimensions of spatial inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC): between rural and urban areas (rural-urban divide), between large or capital cities and secondary cities (metropolitan bias or centralization) and within urban areas (urban segregation). As a first approach, we use information from the Luxembourg Income Stud...

My new Working Paper on urban mobility reform in LAC has just been published by the IADB. It argues that many reforms have not been successful due to insufficient attention paid to the impact of changes on the generalized cost of travel. It also documents some interesting and novel experiences, such as the exemption payment scheme introduced in Cal...

Chile employs subsidies to reduce the bill paid by lower-income households for piped water and sanitation. Previous research has concluded that this system has a lower Gini coefficient (0.29) than expected, meaning it is not appropriately targeted to low-income households. This paper takes a new approach to assessing the subsidy system, taking adva...

We evaluate the targeting properties of the Vale Transporte scheme in Brazil, one of the oldest and most iconic transit subsidies in the Latin American region. We use household survey data for 26 metropolitan areas to calculate the Concentration Index and the Ω Index to determine whether benefits are accruing to workers belonging to low-income hous...

This paper presents the results of a quasi-experimental study using information collected through a survey conducted in peri-urban areas of metropolitan Lima and applied to households residing close to and on both sides of the geographic boundary of piped water supply. We find that access to piped water was associated with a reduction in the probab...

Water utility companies around the globe are seeking to improve their financial sustainability and expand services in growing urban areas, while guaranteeing low-income families access to water. In Lima and Callao, the biggest metropolitan area in Peru, an important tariff reform for their water and sanitation services was implemented in 2017. The...

Latin Americans are city dwellers. In 2020 it was estimated that 81.2% of the region’s inhabitants lived in cities, a share expected to increase to 87.8% by 2050.1 The region also boasts not only six “megacities” but also five of the world’s largest 30 cities. In this context, urban mobility is critical for access to health, educational, and econom...

We use a large dataset from the Chilean unemployment insurance program covering 20% of all formal sector workers to study the impact of commuting time on the likelihood of sick-leave in Santiago, Chile. Our empirical results indicate that longer commuting times are associated with an increase in the probability of sick-leave work absence. A 20% dec...

This paper presents the results of a quasi-experimental study using information collected through a survey conducted in peri-urban areas of Metropolitan Lima between October and November 2021. The survey was applied to households residing close to and on both sides of the geographic boundary of piped water supply. Our work finds that access to pipe...

Ridesourcing platforms have acquired an important role as an alternative travel mode in almost all major cities in the world. These new mobility applications offer benefits for users over traditional taxi and public transport alternatives. However, there is mounting evidence that ridesourcing worsens traffic congestion. Given this potential negativ...

We use data from the Chilean unemployment insurance program covering 20% of all formal sector workers to study the impact of commuting time on the likelihood of medical licences sick-leave use in Santiago, Chile. We estimate panel-data probit models for the determinants of medical license behavior using the pseudo-demeaning algorithm and incidental...

We use data from the Chilean unemployment insurance program covering 20\% of all formal sector workers to study the impact of commuting time on the likelihood of medical license sick-leave use in Santiago, Chile. We estimate panel-data probit models for the determinants of medical license behavior using the pseudo-demeaning algorithm and incidental...

Alrededor de l 92% de la población en Lima Metropolitana y el Callao (Perú) se encontraba conectada , en 2015, a la red de Sedapal , empresa pública a cargo de la prestación de los servicios de agua y saneamiento. Además de incrementar la cobertura del servicio en beneficio de la población más vulnerable , la provisión de servicios enfrentaba otros...

According to Baumol’s Cost Disease in some productive activities that are labor intensive and where labor saving technological change is low or absent, labor productivity tends to be stagnant. However, since these sectors compete for the same inputs, their wage bill increases according to the average productivity growth in the economy. As a consequ...

Ridesourcing platforms have such as Uber, Lyft and others, have gained an important role as an alternative transport mode in almost all major cities of the world. These new mobility applications offer benefits for users over traditional public transport alternatives. However, there is mounting evidence that they also contribute to worsening traffic...

El argumento de la enfermedad de costos de Baumol señala que la producción de determinados servicios está, por razones estructurales, caracterizada por un estancamiento de la productividad. Sin embargo, en vista de que estos sectores compiten por factores de producción con otras áreas de la economía en las que la productividad sí aumenta, los costo...

We use monthly data on transit supply and ridership to evaluate the impact of BRT type reforms in intermediate cities in Colombia. We find that these reforms are associated with a decrease in aggregate transit ridership. This is particularly troubling since it points to a reduction in the attractiveness of public transport for users and a substitut...

En este trabajo se discuten los desafíos para la política pública de la irrupción de las pla­taformas de transporte en el mundo durante la última década. Entre los temas abordados están los efectos de esta innovación tecnológica sobre la seguridad vial, los desafíos tributarios y de financiamiento de los sistemas de transporte público, los estándar...

We use monthly data on transit supply and ridership to evaluate the impact of BRT type reforms in intermediate cities in Colombia. We find that these reforms are associated with a decrease in aggregate transit ridership. This is particularly troubling, since it points to a reduction in the attractiveness of public transport for users and a substitu...

Many authors have pointed out the importance of determining the impact of ride-hailing (ridesourcing) on vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT), and thus on transport externalities like congestion. However, to date there is scant evidence on this subject. In this paper we use survey results on Uber use by residents of Santiago, Chile, and information fr...

The distributional incidence of the Chilean water subsidy scheme is revisited by analyzing its evolution from 1998 to 2015. This is one of the only means-tested water subsidies in a developing country and is frequently used as an example in policy discussions and recommendations. Many changes have been introduced in the program since its inception...

Este artículo examina los determinantes del logro deportivo en los Juegos Panamericanos durante el periodo 1959-1999. La muestra considera un panel de países participantes, en el que la variable por explicar corresponde al número de medallas obtenidas. El modelo empírico planteado supone que el éxito deportivo depende de un conjunto de variables o...

La regulación de las empresas sanitarias en Chile: una revisión crítica

In this paper we study how an incumbent supermarket reacts when entry by a new operator is announced but does not know the product variety that the entrant will offer. We use a database obtained from a special survey for supermarkets in Gran Canaria to estimate how incumbents reacted to entry in the products sold and not sold by the new entrant (LI...

This paper reviews the incentive structure of concession contracts in several Latin American transit reforms. It also presents a conceptual analysis of the optimal design of concession contracts. The conceptual discussion and case studies reviewed indicate that payment to operators should be linked to operational variables and that some demand risk...

Estimating the specific effects of a complete reform of the public transit system of a large city is a difficult task due to the confounding effects that will usually mask the impact of interest. In this study we estimate the impact of the complete reform of the public transport system in Santiago, Chile, named Transantiago, on a specific aspect of...

Estimating the specific effects of a complete reform of the public transit system of a large city is a difficult task due to the confounding effects that will usually mask the impact of interest. In this study we estimate the impact of the complete reform of the public transport system in Santiago, Chile, named Transantiago, on a specific aspect of...

Using a panel of 48 provinces for four years we empirically analyze a series of temporary and permanent policies aimed at curbing fuel consumption implemented in Spain between March and June 2011. The first policy was a reduction in the speed limit in highways. The second policy was an increase in the biofuel content of fuels used in the transport...

Using a panel of 48 provinces for four years we empirically analyze a series of temporary policies aimed at curbing fuel consumption implemented in Spain between March and June 2011. The first policy was a reduction in the speed limit in highways. The second policy was an increase in the biofuel content of fuels used in the transport sector. The th...

This paper discusses some institutional and procedural designs that can strengthen CBA as a decision making tool within the public sector. Our discussion is based on Chile’s National Public Investment System (SNI) the earliest and most consolidated investment appraisal system in Latin America. The objective of Chile’s SNI is to provide a coherent f...

In Santiago, the capitol of Chile, an ambitious reform of the public transport industry, aptly named Transantiago, was introduced in February 2007. Serious design and implementation problems were immediately evident, creating one of the most important social and political crises in Chile since the return to democracy more than 20 years ago. In this...

Este trabajo estima el impacto que tuvo la reforma integral del sistema de transporte público en Santiago de Chile, denominada Transantiago, sobre la contaminación atmosférica en dicha ciudad. Un aporte del trabajo es que muestra cómo, utilizando un modelo econométrico y datos diarios de contaminación, develar técnicamente los impactos ambientales...

There has been a surge of interest recently on the relation between poverty and transport policies. When analysing the relation between poverty and transport, concern often centres on the affordability of public transport. In this paper we present two alternative definitions of affordability used in the transport literature and discuss their limita...

This paper discusses the recent literature concerning the Mohring effect and the need to subsidize public transport in order to provide optimal frequencies when there is a monopoly provider. We show that all of the results of this literature are special cases of Spence (1975), albeit with a small adjustment in order to take into account the cost st...

Este trabajo presenta una discusión en torno a los diseños institucionales que se pueden adoptar para reducir el riesgo identificado anteriormente y así potenciar la evaluación social de proyectos como instrumento que contribuya positivamente a la asignación de recursos en la economía. Esta discusión se basa en la experiencia latinoamericana, parti...

The regulatory lag- the number of years between price reviews - determines the power of a price-cap contract. Around the world, most price-cap contracts have a regulatory lag of four to five years. However, this practice doesn’t seem to be based on any optimality consideration.Schmalensee (1989) used a static model to study the optimal power of reg...

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Most public transport subsidies in developing countries are justified on equity or social grounds. However, it is not clear how well current subsidies meet these objectives. In this paper the author evaluates several public transport subsidies in the case of Santiago, Chile. This is an interesting case study because in recent years direct means-tes...

Chile increased boarding charges for international flights to finance campaigns for promoting the country as a tourist destination and to support a ‘Fight Against Poverty’ fund. We present a comparative review of airport charges in various countries around the world using a non-parametric comparative efficiency technique. The results indicate that...

Over the last 20 years, demand for air passenger transport has grown dramatically. At the same time, the two largest domestic airlines merged and several smaller entrants exited without being able to make significant inroads. As a result, the industry is highly concentrated, with a dominant firm and a few fringe firms. This condition has generated...

This paper investigates the structure of tariffs in civil aviation in Chile and the potential cross-subsidies that it generates. We estimate the crosssubsidies that currently exist in this transport networks and find that the current tariff structure generates a number of cross subsidies between airports. In particular, the airports of La Serena, P...

Private sector participation in the provision of water and sanitation services in Colombia has its origin in the 1991 Constitution that authorized the government to delegate the provision of public services to private sector providers while retaining responsibility for regulation, supervision and control, and in the enactment of Law 142 of 1994, th...

In this paper a model is presented based on ideas borrowed from the job search and price dispersion literature to characterise the pricing equilibrium of a competitive bus market in a more general setting than previously found in the literature. The results indicate that collusion is not required to obtain a monopoly price structure. Rather collusi...

In 2001 an individual (operationally transferable) quota system was introduced for all the most important industrial fisheries in Chile. This system was put in place after years of declining stocks and over investment. In this paper we describe this reform and estimate related allocative efficiency benefits for the most important industrial fishery...

Subsidy policies on public urban transport have been adopted ubiquitously. In both developed and developing countries, subsidies are implemented to make transport more affordable. Despite their widespread implementation, there are virtually no quantitative assessments of their distributional incidence, making it impossible to determine if these ins...

This paper investigates the impact of PSP on the poor in the Colombian water sector in terms of access, continuity of service and affordability. Overall, the results indicate that PSP in the Colombian water sector has had a strong and positive impact on the poor as far as continuity of service is concerned; which is crucial for effective water supp...

El propósito de este trabajo es comparar las tarifas de Banda Ancha en Chile con una muestra amplia de países, tanto de la región como de la OECD. Para ello se ha construido una base de datos especial de 124 planes de acceso a Banda Ancha en 16 países en mayo-junio del 2006, que contiene información sobre los precios y características de cada plan,...

Las tasas y derechos aeronáuticos son los precios que pagan los usuarios del sistema aeronáutico nacional por los diversos servicios que presta el sector. En Chile se anunció un aumento en la tasa de embarque para pasajeros en vuelos internacionales de los US$ 26 que se cobra actualmente a US$ 30 por pasajero. Los recursos recaudados se utilizarían...

This paper examines the determinants of sporting success of different countries in the Pan-American Games during the 1959-1999 period. The data consists of a panel of participant countries, where the variable of interest corresponds to the number of medals obtained by each country in each of the Games. The empirical model assumes that international...

This paper examines the determinants of sporting success of different countries in the Pan-American Games during the 1959-1999 period. The data consists of a panel of participant countries, where the variable of interest corresponds to the number of medals obtained by each country in each of the Games. The empirical model assumes that international...

Este Documento es producto del trabajo de Académicos del Departamento de Administración During the past three decades, urban public transport policy has gone through several phases. From public ownership and monopoly provision, the 1980s and 1990s were characterized by a strong liberalization of the sector. This experience showed the limits of libe...

Price caps are a popular form of monopoly price regulation. One of its disadvantages is the perverse incentives that regulated firms might have to scamp on cost reducing effort during the last years before a price review. In order to avoid this problem a “rolling cap†contract was introduced in the United Kingdom that overcomes this last problem...

Poner fin a los graves problemas que presenta el transporte público en Santiago (tiempos de viaje largos, congestión, inseguridad, alta tasa de accidentes, mala calidad del servicio, contaminación acústica y del aire), sostienen los autores de este trabajo, supone diseñar una regulación moderna que vaya más allá de las licitaciones de los años nove...

En la UE se ha estimado que los costes de la congesti�n representan el 2% de su PIB y que el coste de la poluci�n del aire y ruido supera el 0,6% del PIB, siendo alrededor del 90% de los mismos ocasionados por el transporte terrestre. Ante este hecho y el continuo aumento de la demanda del transporte privado frente al p�blico para los desplazamient...

In this paper a cost frontier model is estimated for an eleven-year panel of Norwegian bus companies (1136 company-year observations) using the methodology proposed by Battese and Coelli (1995). The main objective of the paper is to investigate to what extent different type of regulatory contracts affect company performance. The panel model propose...

The psychological literature has emphasized that choice complexity and other contextual factors affect how people make decisions. However, empirical economic choice models generally do not consider the complexity of different scenarios when estimating preferences from contingent valuation or stated choice models. Recently Swait and Adamowicz (2001b...

The perception that privatization hurts the poor is growing and creating a backlash against the private provision of basic infrastructure services. At the same time, governments are finding themselves fiscally strapped, searching for ways to finance the large investments needed to expand services to the poor. In Latin America, a laboratory for priv...

We develop and implement a collocation method to solve for an equilibrium in the dynamic legislative bargaining game of Duggan and Kalandrakis (2008). We formulate the collocation equations in a quasi-discrete version of the model, and we show that the collocation equations are locally Lipchitz continuous and directionally differentiable. In numeri...

The effort to correct the national accounts in order calculate NNP or related ‘Green GDP’ concepts, known as natural resources accounting, has been a lively research area in the last decade. Two basic methodologies have been proposed in the literature to value the loss of natural assets, the net price or depreciation method and the user cost approa...

Efforts to reform utilities can affect poor households in varied, often complex, ways, but it is by no means certain that such reform will hurt vulnerable households. Many myths have been perpetuated in discussions of utility reform - and in many cases poor households have benefited from reform. What is amazing is the extent to which governments, a...

In designing a rational scheme for subsidizing water services, it is important to support the choice of design parameters with empirical analysis that stimulates the impact of subsidy options on the target population. Otherwise, there is little guarantee that the subsidy program will meet its objectives. But such analysis is informationally demandi...

To increase investment in infrastructure, in the early 1990s Chile's government introduced private capital into the transport infrastructure sector, covering roads and highways, bridges, tunnels, and airports. The chosen mechanism: a concession scheme through which private firms would finance and build a given project and then operate the infrastru...

As an alternative to traditional subsidy schemes in utility sectors, direct subsidy programs have several advantages: they are transparent, they are explicit, and they minimize distortions of the behavior of both the utility, and the customers. At the same time, defining practical eligibility criteria for direct subsidy schemes is difficult, and id...

In the last fifteen years, theoretical economists have reformulated the theory of regulation using the tools of informational economics. Although theoretical advances in the field have been numerous, empirical work on the subject has been sparse. The main objective of this thesis is to apply empirical techniques to different topics in the area of r...

This paper concerns the relationship between refuse collection contract costs and the number of bidders for a sample of English local authorities. Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) of blue collar services such as refuse collection and street cleaning was introduced in the UK by the Local Government Act 1988. This law, imposed by central govern...

In this paper a structural model is developed to estimate a cost function that includes both an adverse selection and a moral hazard variable. It is shown how traditional cost function estimates may produced biased results if moral hazard is present. This gives an alternative reason to Feinstein and Wolak [The econometric implications of incentive...

In this paper we use data on the Norwegian bus transport industry to investigate the effects of different regulatory mechanisms and their economic implications. We develop a model that includes an efficiency parameter and a cost reduction effort variable, both of which enter the cost function, but which are not directly observable by the regulator....

The domestic energy markets in the United Kingdom are still in a process of structural change. Earlier this year, limited competition for the supply of household domestic gas was introduced, with full-scale competition expected to develop in the next few years. Competition for the supply of electricity to households is expected to begin in 1998. Th...

The purpose of this article is to argue that one of the key problems related to sustainable develop­ ment is that the main indicators of economic performance are biased against an environmentally sound development. The reason is that National Account indices, such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), do not consider natural resources and other envi...

Hace dos décadas se introdujo en Chile un sistema de derechos transables de agua. Recientemente, el gobierno ha propuesto intro- ducir un costo a quienes poseen un derecho de agua y no lo usan. Esta iniciativa se basa en el supuesto de que los derechos transables no solucionarían un problema de eficiencia, pues muchos propieta- rios no los usan. Es...

In this paper we investigate the effects of different regulatory contracts on operational cost performance for Norwegian urban transport companies. Exploiting the panel nature of our data (11 years and 1136 company-year observations), we propose a method to estimate regional time varying inefficiency measures that overcomes some of the shortcomings...

Wodon for very useful discussions and suggestions. We are however solely responsible for any mistake or interpretation. None of the institutions we are affiliated with should be credited with endorsing the results of the analysis presented here. A special thanks to Vanessa Moreira who processed all the household survey data used in this paper and t...

T h e W o r l d B a n k G r o u p ▪ P r i v a t e S e c t o r a n d I n f r a s t r u c t u r e N e t w o r k Reform of the water, electricity, and telecommunications sectors is gathering momentum in nearly all developing countries. Reform should include an assessment of whether subsidies are necessary and if so, how to design subsidies that reach...