Benjamin Villena-Roldan

Benjamin Villena-Roldan
Andrés Bello University | UNAB

PhD in Economics

About

33
Publications
4,272
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233
Citations
Introduction
Labor markets, especially online job boards. Labor market transitions and their impact on sorting, efficiency, and inequality. Search and insurance. Social Capital and Public Policies. Voting behavior.
Education
September 2004 - June 2009
University of Rochester
Field of study
  • Economics

Publications

Publications (33)
Article
Full-text available
In emerging economies, policymakers should care not only about the informality level but also about its persistence, which also has key welfare implications. Considering worker flows that drive people into informality is important for developing effective public policies. Using a Markov representation of worker flows and correcting for time aggrega...
Preprint
Full-text available
Employers hire more selectively between heterogeneous productivity workers when applicants' queues are longer. Consistently, CPS data reveal a positive and concave relation between unemployment rates and wage inequality. We rationalize intuition and evidence altogether using a nonsequential search model in which selective hiring stretches out the r...
Article
Full-text available
Employers hire more selectively between heterogeneous productivity workers when applicants’ queues are longer. Consistently, CPS data reveal a positive and concave relation between unemployment rates and wage inequality. We rationalize intuition and evidence altogether using a nonsequential search model in which selective hiring stretches out the r...
Preprint
Full-text available
We use online job board data to document novel facts regarding unemployment and on-the-job searches. We define a relevant set of job ads using the bipartite network between ads and applicants and show how applications are affected by demographics such as gender, age, and marital status as well as timing variables like unemployment duration, job ten...
Article
Full-text available
We demonstrate that regression models can be estimated by working independently in a row-wise fashion. We document a simple procedure which allows for a wide class of econometric estimators to be implemented cumulatively, where, in the limit, estimators can be produced without ever storing more than a single line of data in a computer's memory. Thi...
Chapter
Full-text available
Libro de la Comisión Desafíos del Futuro, Ciencia, tecnología e Innovación del Senado de la República de Chile 2018-2022 https://www.bcn.cl/publicaciones/ediciones-bcn/detalle_libro?id=10221.1/85083
Article
Full-text available
Using proprietary data from a Chilean online job board, we compute sorting between workers and job positions during the application stage (ex ante) and predict sorting in the flow and stock of created matches (ex post) for different type measures. We find strong evidence for positive and procyclical correlations between workers and job types. Since...
Preprint
Full-text available
La curva de Beveridge es una relación estadística negativa entre vacantes -una medida de la demanda por trabajadores- y los postulantes -una medida de la oferta de trabajadores-: un alto valor de vacantes se asocia a menos postulantes, y viceversa. Esta regularidad empírica se observa en Chile y en otros mercados laborales.La coexistencia de emplea...
Article
Labor markets become more efficient in theory if jobseekers direct their search. Using online job board data, we show that high-wage ads attract more applicants as in directed search models. Due to distinctive data features, we also estimate significant but milder directed search for hidden (or implicit) wages, suggesting that ad texts and requirem...
Article
Full-text available
We use an unusually rich data from a Chilean job board to document novel facts regarding job search for unemployed and employed seekers. We show how application behavior is influenced by (1) demographics such as gender, age, and marital status, (2) alignment between applicant wage expectations and wage offers, (3) applicant fit into ad requirements...
Article
Full-text available
Using proprietary data from a Chilean online job board, we compute sorting between workers and job positions types at the application stage (ex ante) and predict sorting in the flow and stock of created matches (ex post) for different type measures. We find strong evidence for positive and procyclical correlations between workers and job types. Sin...
Preprint
Full-text available
Using proprietary data from a Chilean online job board, we find strong, positive assortative matching at the worker-position level, both along observed dimensions and on unobserved characteristics (OLS Mincer residual wages). We also find that this positive assortative matching is robustly procyclical. Then, we use the generalized deferred-acceptan...
Article
Full-text available
We study how the local institutional context shapes local government decisions about responses to perceived threats of natural disasters and climatic change. We draw on institutional theories and field observations to develop hypotheses about the effects of municipal institutional arrangements, social capital, and multilevel governance. To test the...
Article
We study how the local institutional context shapes local government decisions about responses to perceived threats of natural disasters and climatic change. We draw on institutional theories and field observations to develop hypotheses about the effects of municipal institutional arrangements, social capital, and multilevel governance. To test the...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We draw on neo-institutional theories to understand the impact of local governance performance, government decisions, social capital, and their role in driving local efforts to reduce risks associated with climate change and future disasters. We propose that institutional municipal arrangements and characteristics such as national policies, multile...
Article
Full-text available
The purpose of this study is to identify institutional factors and processes that foster local government decisions about disaster risk reduction, especially critical infrastructure investments and maintenance. We propose that municipal institutional capacities, organization, leadership, and multilevel governance will affect critical infrastructure...
Working Paper
Full-text available
Labor markets become more efficient in theory if jobseekers direct their search. Using online job board data, we show that high-wage ads attract more applicants as in directed search models. Due to distinctive data features, we also estimate significant but milder directed search for hidden (or implicit) wages, suggesting that ad texts and requirem...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
As suggested in the Climate Change literature (Field et al . 2012; Smit et al. 2014), we highlight multiple aspects of climate change responses and adaptation. First, we focus the decisions of local governments to manage risks and climate change adaptation as an investment decision, given contextual social, economic and politico-institutional chara...
Article
Full-text available
This paper introduces a rational choice model for multiple kinds of participation to empirically investigate several theoretical determinants of social capital (SC) formation. The framework is rich enough to investigate the importance of individual variables, social/peer effects, endogenous trust, political-institutional, and inequality factors as...
Article
Full-text available
This paper introduces a rational choice model for multiple kinds of participation to empirically investigate several theoretical determinants of Social Capital (SC) formation. The framework is rich enough to investigate the importance of individual variables, social/peer effects, endogenous trust, political-institutional, and inequality factors as...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper introduces an ordinal rational choice model for multiple kinds of social participation intensities to empirically investigate the relevance of several theoretical determinants of formation of Social Capital. Using Chilean Data, we find that politico-institutional factors are jointly important to account for SC formation, as well as socia...
Article
Proposers strategically formulate legislative bills before voting takes place. However, spatial voting models that estimate legislator's ideological preferences do not explicitly consider this fact. In our model, proposers determine the ideology and valence of legislative bills to maximize their objective functions. Approaching to the median legisl...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Proposers strategically formulate legislative bills before voting takes place. However, spatial voting models that estimate legislator’s ideological preferences do not explicitly consider this fact. In our model, proposers determine the ideology and valence of legislative bills to maximize their objective functions. Approaching to the median legisl...
Article
We estimate life-cycle transition probabilities between employment, unemployment and inactivity for U.S. workers. We assess the importance of each worker flow to account for participation and unemployment rates over the life-cycle. We find that inactivity exit and entry matter, but the empirically relevant margins defy conventional wisdom. High youth...
Article
Full-text available
This paper introduces an ordinal rational choice model for multiple kinds of social participation intensities to empirically investigate the relevance of several theoretical determinants of formation of Social Capital (SC) introduced in the literature. The framework is rich enough to investigate the importance of demographic individual variables, s...
Article
Many social scientists hypothesize that the time mothers spend with their children is crucial for children’s cognitive development. Unlike most studies that investigate maternal employment effects on children, we estimate direct casual effects of time-diary measured maternal time using the CDS – PSID dataset. Considering maternal time allocation en...
Article
Full-text available
The calibrated model can replicate moments of the distribution of wages and unemployment durations in CPS data. Using this parametrization, I also show that an increase of screening costs reduces inequality and productive efficiency, and decreases negative externalities on other employers.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper empirically investigates several theoretical determinants of formation of Social Capital (SC), in a context of discrete rational choice of participation intensity, social interactions, endogenous trust, political and institutional factors for Chilean municipalities. We find that politico-institutional factors are jointly important to acc...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper empirically investigates several theoretical determinants of formation of Social Capital (SC), in a context of rational choice of participation intensity, social interactions, endoge- nous trust, and institutional factors for Chilean municipalities. We �nd that institutional factors are jointly important to account for SC formation, as w...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We develop a simple spatial voting model where the proposer of legislative bills controls their ideological content and valence. Due to this feature, the proposer might be willing to give in her preferred ideological point and to generate valence in order to overcome gridlock. We simulate the model via Monte Carlo and we show that individual ideolo...
Article
The model also predicts (i) residual wage dispersion of level wages increasing in productivity; (ii) residual wage dispersion of log wages decreasing in productivity; (iii) a negative relation between unemployment and residual wage dispersion and (iv) positive relation between productivity dispersion and residual wage dispersion. To assess these em...

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