Francisco Rodriguez

Tulane University | TU · Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies

Our paper in this issue sets out to do a simple task: to empirically evaluate the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between the number of low-skilled migrant workers and their rights using existing cross-national data. In his reply, Martin Ruhs argues that our criticism is unconvincing because our data on numbers do not adequately capture the o...

This paper explores the empirical support behind the idea that there is a trade-off between the size of the migrant population and the rights and entitlements enjoyed by immigrants. We first look at the empirical correlation between measures of migrants’ rights and the size of the stock of immigrants in a number of existing databases. Using data on...

Even critics of Hugo Chavez tend to concede that he has made helping the poor his top priority. But in fact, Chavez's government has not done any more to fight poverty than past Venezuelan governments, and his much-heralded social programs have had little effect. A dose look at the evidence reveals just how much Chavez's "revolution" has hurt Venez...

Tuition fees increased rapidly in the 1990s in most Canadian provinces raising concerns about access to post-secondary education. This paper examines the role of tuition fees in explaining participation in college and university programs from 1997 to 1999 in all provinces except Quebec and Ontario. Differentiated responses to tuition fees by family...

This paper explores whether the post-1980 decline in infrastructure investment in developing countries is a source of growing disparities in world per capita GDP. I start by reviewing the literature on the infrastructure-productivity link, arguing that a balanced reading of previous studies points to a significant effect of infrastructure provision...

Venezuelans are to vote on December 2 on major constitutional reform proposals of president Hugo Chávez. If they are approved, Chávez will have consolidated his hold on power and will have substantially diminished the chances of success of any future challenges to his leadership. They will also bring about a number of significant changes that are i...

This paper explores the relevance of unknown nonlinearities for growth empirics. Recent theoretical contributions and case-study evidence suggest that nonlinearities are pervasive in the growth process. I show that the postwar data provide strong evidence in favor of generalized non-linearities. I provide two alternative mechanisms for making infer...

Tuition fees increased rapidly in the 1990s in most Canadian provinces raising concerns about access to post-secondary education. This paper examines the role of tuition fees in explaining participation in college and university programs from 1997 to 1999 in all provinces except Quebec and Ontario. Differentiated responses to tuition fees by family...

Do countries with lower policy-induced barriers to international trade grow faster, once other relevant country characteristics are controlled for? There exists a large empirical literature providing an affirmative answer to this question. We argue that methodological problems with the empirical strategies employed in this literature leave the resu...

This article suggests an alternative explanation for why resource-rich economies have lower growth rates: because they are likely to be living beyond their means. It is shown that overshooting the steady state's equilibrium consumption and investment can be optimal in a Ramsey growth model with natural resources. Therefore, the economy will converg...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The authors spend almost a third of the paper convincing the reader-- without any econometrics--that neither investment/savings and education nor appropriability issues should be viewed as a strategy for triggering growth in the case of El Salvador, although it is useful to sustain it....

Existing work in growth empirics either assumes linearity of the growth function or attempts to capture non-linearities by the addition of a small number of quadratic or multiplicative interaction terms. Under a more generalized failure of linearity or if the functional form taken by the non-linearity is not known ex ante, such an approach is inade...

Este informe es parte de un serie de publicaciones que presentan una agenda de datos y análisis sobre un tema en particular, con la finalidad de llamar la atención internacional para enfocarse en cuestiones y opciones políticas que pongan a las personas en el centro de las estrategias, con el objetivo de afrontar los retos de desarrollo en la actua...