Publications

Topic modeling in news articles: an example from Brazil

Published in UCL Repository, 2022

Even though economic uncertainty impacts a country’s economic activity, it remains a challenge to measure it. The effects of uncertainty can be even more profound and prolonged on emerging market economies. This is the case of Brazil, an emerging market economy that expe-rienced a recession between 2014- 2016, political instability, and corruption scandals in the last decade. To identify the topics related to economic uncertainty and how these topics inform the country’s Economic Uncertainty Index (IIE-Br), we used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling approach. This technique allows us to identify the hidden topics from an extensive collection of texts, in our case, newspapers. For this purpose, we used the newspaper article database provided by Funda ̧c ̃ao Getulio Vargas (FGV). Our database consists of 8263 articles related to economic uncertainty between 2009-2020 from Estad ̃ao, one of Brazil’s most influential newspapers. We extracted fifteen topics related to economic uncertainty, such as elections, politics, and international relations, between others, that gave us more information on the topics that drive uncertainty the most in Brazil and how these topics have changed over time.

The effect of increasing land value capture on the gross value added of the construction sector

Published in Journal of Applied Economics Letters, 2021

This paper estimates the effect of an increase in land value tax related to capital gains on the gross value added (GVA) of the construction sector. Using synthetic control method, the results indicate that the GVA of the construction sector presented an average yearly decline of 7.1% between the trimesters in which the LOEVT was promoted until the trimester it was repealed. Placebo tests applied to other sectors, excluding the construction sector, validate our result.

Recommended citation: Nicolás Acosta-González, Sebastián Rodríguez-Raza & Rafaela Bastidas-Ripalda (2021) The effect of increasing land value capture on the gross value added of the construction sector, Applied Economics Letters, 28:1, 65-69, DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2020.1733467 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504851.2020.1733467

Misallocation and manufacturing TFP in Ecuador: formal, semi-formal and informal firms

Published in Journal of Economic Structures, 2019

Resource misallocation can lower the aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). We use micro-data on manufacturing establishments from the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Estadística y Censos to quantify the differences in productivity and diagnose the efficiency in the allocation of resources between formal and informal firms in the Ecuadorian in the manufacturing sector. We use the model proposed by Hsieh and Klenow (Q J Econ 124(4):1403–1448, 2009) to find informal firms have lower physical productivity than formal firms. We also found formal firms have a restricted growth due to capital and output distortions. These results indicate the existence of an inefficient allocation of resources between firms. By reallocating resources to equalize marginal productivity in the manufacturing sector, we calculate TFP gains of 80% in 2002 and 69% in 2015.

Recommended citation: Bastidas, R., Acosta, N. Misallocation and manufacturing TFP in Ecuador: formal, semi-formal and informal firms. Economic Structures 8, 16 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40008-019-0147-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40008-019-0147-1

Productividad total de factores de las empresas formales e informales del Ecuador en el sector de la manufactura, período 2002-2015

Published in Repositorio PUCE, 2018

La presente investigación tiene como finalidad el estudio de la relación entre productividad e informalidad para las empresas manufactureras del Ecuador en el sector de la manufactura en el período 2002-2015, para lo que se utilizarán datos utilizados provienen de las Encuestas de Manufactura y Minería del INEC. El tipo de investigación es de carácter descriptivo-correlacional, y el método de investigación es cuantitativo. Se desea caracterizar a las encuestas formales e informales, contrastar las diferencias de productividad y distorsiones entre las empresas formales e informales, calcular las ganancias de una asignación eficiente de recursos sin presencia de distorsiones, y analizar los elementos que influyen en la asignación de recursos entre las empresas manufactureras ecuatorianas. Se utiliza el modelo propuesto por Hsieh y Klenow (2009), y se encuentra que las empresas informales tienen una productividad física menor que las empresas formales, y que las empresas formales tienen un crecimiento restringido debido a las distorsiones que enfrentan. Se estudian como potenciales causas de las diferencias de productividad e ineficiente asignación de recursos al crédito y financiamiento, impuestos, seguridad social y obligaciones laborales. Los resultados sugieren la existencia de una ineficiente asignación de recursos entre empresas e indican que se pueden obtener ganancias de productividad mediante una reasignación de capital y trabajo. De manera que se encontró que, al reasignar recursos para igualar la productividad marginal de los factores en el sector de la manufactura, se obtendrían ganancias de productividad del 80% en el 2002 y del 69% en el 2015.

Recommended citation: Bastidas Ripalda, R. (2018). Productividad total de factores de las empresas formales e informales del Ecuador en el sector de la manufactura, período 2002-2015. https://repositorio.puce.edu.ec/items/3b9c2145-1b28-43fb-8fbd-74f4c83348b1