Julio H. Cole

Francisco Marroquín University | FMU · Faculty of Economic Science

Al conmemorar el tricentenario del naci-miento de Adam Smith, es importante recordar que no sólo fue autor de la justamente célebre obra conocida como "La riqueza de las naciones", publicada en 1776. Diez y siete años antes, en 1759, Smith había publicado su primera obra importante, "La teoría de los sentimientos morales".

Applications of time series models serve two different purposes: (1) as forecasting techniques, they are used to project the trajectory of a variable of interest during a certain number of future periods; (2) in the analysis of interventions, they are used to evaluate the effect of a significant disturbance on the process being studied. We use both...

Como herramientas de análisis, los modelos de series cronológicas se usan para dos tipos de aplicación: (1) cuando se emplean como técnicas de pronóstico, lo que se busca es proyectar la probable trayectoria de una variable de interés durante cierto número de períodos futuros; (2) en el análisis de intervenciones, los modelos estimados se utilizan...

Este documento recoge una colección de casos prácticos preparados para uso en clase, y que serán incorporados a la próxima revisión de mi texto “Elementos de Econometría Aplicada” (3ª ed., Guatemala: J & G Ediciones, 2014). Aunque su propósito primordial es ilustrar la aplicación práctica de las técnicas del análisis de regresión lineal, muchos de...

This listing provides bibliographic information on all books written by Ludwig von Mises, the noted Austrian economist and scholar. It is based on the bibliographic information provided by Bien Greaves and McGee (1993, see Section B), updated and supplemented with information on works published since then. With a few exceptions—such as the Human Ac...

Mario Vargas Llosa, el famoso novelista peruano, es también un "intelectual público" en el pleno sentido de la expresión, y sus opiniones sobre temas políticos-y sobre literatura, arte y cultura en general son un referente obligado en los debates intelectuales en el mundo hispano-parlante. Sus escritos, siempre ele-gantes y bien logrados, reflejan...

Slightly revised and updated version of a compilation published originally in Laissez-Faire, No. 36-37 (2012): 97-122. This bibliography is based upon three earlier bibliographical orientations to Friedman’s writings: Niels Thygesen, “The Scientific Contributions of Milton Friedman,” Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 79 (1977): 84-98, Kurt Leube...

“The essays and papers in this book represent a fair sampling of my views on some of the main themes and research topics that have held my professional attention over the past three decades,” writes economist Julio Cole, the author of this collection. The topics of the essays vary widely, from history of economic thought to studies of economic grow...

Links to online video files of lectures and interviews on subjects that I have researched recently.

"Utopía" es una palabra inventada hace 500 años por Tomás Moro, quien acopló las palabras en griego para “no” y “lugar” para denotar la idea de un lugar imaginario o inexistente, y también aprovechó la homofonía con “eu-topía” (buen lugar) para sugerir este doble aspecto del concepto: en toda la literatura subsiguiente la idea de utopía se asocia c...

Salant (1969) complained that on many occasions he found the writing of his fellow economists " nearly incomprehensible, " and made suggestions to improve economists " writing skills (and, by extension, those of natural and social scientists in general). Among other things, he argued that good writers tend to use shorter words. We call this " the S...

Presented at the 2015 Regional Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society (Lima, Peru, March 23, 2015).

Un pleno entendimiento del moderno sistema monetario y bancario implica necesariamente conocer, entre otras cosas, qué es el dinero, de dónde viene, de qué depende su valor, cuáles son los factores que producen cambios en la cantidad de dinero y cuáles son las consecuencias de dichos cambios sobre el sistema económico en general. Este es el propós...

Joe Keckeissen, quien falleció este año en la ciudad de Quetzaltenango, fue uno de los primeros profesores de la Universidad Francisco Marroquín y era una figura conocida en esta comunidad académica, tanto en el campus central como en la extensión de Quetzaltenango. Personaje singular, fue muy querido por las muchas generaciones de estudiantes que...

Julio H. Cole explains how Mario Vargas Llosa is a public intellectual in the frill sense of that expression, and his regularly aired opinions on political events, literature, culture, and the arts are a fixture of the intellectual life of this part of the world. His writing is always intelligent and urbane. He eventually became convinced, however,...

SummaryW.A. Wallis studied vacancies in the US Supreme Court over a 96-year period (1837–1932) and found that the distribution of the number of vacancies per year could be characterized by a Poisson model. This note updates this classic study.

This study uses a regression analysis to explore the cross-country variation in homicide rates for a large sample of countries. It starts by identifying seven significant regional variables, to which traditional socioeconomic, cultural, and institutional variables are added and tested. The importance of institutions, culture, and other factors affe...

Resumen. Mario Vargas Llosa, además de ser un gran escritor narrativo, es un "intelectual público" en el pleno sentido de la expresión, y sus opiniones sobre temas de actualidad tienen gran influencia en el mundo hispano-parlante. Wellsprings, uno de sus libros más recientes, ofrece un compendio de su pensamiento actual sobre temas políticos y soci...

There is a certain tension in Milton Friedman's views on the issue of freedom versus equality, which was much more nuanced than is commonly assumed. On the one hand, he argued that economic policy should focus on freedom as a primary value; stressing equality per se could lead to economic inefficiency as well as jeopardizing freedom itself. On the...

Milton Friedman, who died in the early morning of November 16, 2006, was a world-famous economist, and an ardent and effective advocate of the free market economy. Much of his celebrity derived from his role as public intellectual, an aspect of his work that was reflected largely in popular books, such as Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and the hugel...

Milton Friedman is a world-famous economist and an ardent and effective advocate of the free-market economy. Friedman had a profound impact on economic research during his lifetime, and his influence reached far beyond the particular fields he chose for his own research. His famous essay in 1953, "The Methodology of Positive Economics" is arguably...

A RECENT EXCHANGE BETWEEN LAWSON (2006) AND DE HAAN and Sturm (2006) highlights an important methodological issue in empirical studies of the connection between economic freedom (EF) and economic growth.

Eponymy is the practice of affixing the name of the scientist to all part of what he has found. However, eponymy is not limited to scientific and scholarly activity, but is a common feature of everyday language. Economists may be ranked amateurs as compared to scientists and mathematicians on their use of eponymy but they have contributed their fai...

The purpose of this study is to explain the statistical variation in economic growth rates in a broad cross-section of countries, over the period 1980-99. This problem will be addressed within the framework of the so-called "growth-regression" approach, which seeks to explain this variation by relating economic growth to a list of potential explana...

Desde 1986, un grupo de investigadores asociados con el Fraser Institute se han concentrado en la definición y medición de un índice de libertad económica mundial (Easton y Walker, 1992; Gwartney, Block y Lawson, 1996; Gwartney y Lawson, 2003). Este esfuerzo ha culminado en el desarrollo de un índice numérico que en su versión más reciente (Gwartne...

The purpose of this study is to explain the statistical variation in economic growth rates in a broad cross-section of countries, over the period 1980-99. This problem will be addressed within the framework of the so-called “growth-regression” approach, which seeks to explain this variation by relating economic growth to a list of potential explana...

Se comentan algunas tendencias recientes en materia de propiedad intelectual, con énfasis en dos leyes estadounidenses, la Ley Sonny Bono y la ley DMCA, ambas de 1998. La primera prolongó en 20 años la duración de copyrights vigentes, y su constitucionalidad fue impugnada en una demanda reciente. La segunda elimina, en el ámbito digital, dos distin...

Since 1986, a group of researchers associated with the Fraser Institute have focused on the definition and measurement of an internationally comparable index of economic freedom (Easton and Walker 1992; Gwartney, Block, and Lawson 1996). This work has resulted in the development of a numerical index that now ranks 123 countries in terms of their de...

It seems to me highly desirable that liberals shall strongly disagree on these topics, the more the better. What is needed more than anything else is that these questions of a policy for a competitive order should once again b ecome live issues which are being discussed publicly; and we shall have made an important contribution if we succeed in d i...

A distributed lag model is used to explain the variation in annual inflation rates in Guatemala over the period 1961 to 1995. Separate regression models are estimated for the two major components of the overall CPI: food and non-food items. The implications of differences in the estimated models for short-run inflation dynamics are briefly discusse...

1 " Hubo una vez un caballero que leyó la Riqueza de las Naciones; no un resumen, ni un volumen de pasajes selectos, sino la Riqueza de las Naciones en sí. Empezó con la Introducción, leyó el famoso primer capítulo sobre la división del trabajo, los capítulos sobre el origen y los usos del dinero, los precios de las mercancías, los salarios del tra...

Preface Inflation in Latin America: A Monetarist View An Alternative View: The Structuralist Argument Revisited Inflation in a Small Country: A Case Study of Bolivia A Summing Up Appendix: Statistical Aspects of Inflation Rates Bibliography Index

In spite of the large volume of empirical evidence in favor of the monetary explanation of inflation, in many circles the phenomenon is still commonly attributed to other causes. A popular view, both at the level of financial press as well as in academic discussions, holds that the sustained and continuous rise in a country's internal prices is due...

The notion of a secular decline in the terms of trade of primary producing countries is a persistent theme in the public discussion of the problems of developing areas, and has been advanced most forcefully in the writtings of Raul Prebisch. A cceptance of such views is implicit in most critiques of the international economic order. However, upon r...

In explaining the highly varied inflationary experience of sixteen Latin American countries, a simple quantity theory model is shown to be quite robust in the sense that variations in the rate of monetary growth and in the rate of real growth explain practically all of the variation in the rate of inflation. The correlation-causation issue is addre...