Lately, questionings have emerged on how public resources are managed. This work calculates the technical efficiency of municipalities in Chile, with special emphasis on the political factors that drive efficiency in the management of local resources. In particular, focus is placed on the relationship between political ideology of the local government and central government. To do this, we use a panel data of Chilean municipalities for the years 2010-2016. The methodology follows two stages. First, we estimate efficiency scores by the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach.

We present the results of a series of economic laboratory experiments designed to study the compliance behavior of polluting firms when penalties are stochastic. The experiments consist of a regulatory environment in which university students faced emission standards and an enforcement mechanism composed of audit probabilities and penalties (conditional on detection of a violation).

The last decade has seen a significant global increase in immigration. This large growth has caused an increasing opposition to immigration in local populations in many parts of the world, partly because of a commonly held belief that immigration increases crime. Using data from Chile, spanning 10 years, from 2005 to 2015, we analyze the relationship between immigration and crime through a dynamic Spatial Durbin Model (SDM), which accounts for the possible bias for omitted variables.

This paper investigates the relation between risk taking and market power in the US banking sector by introducing the effect of geographical spillovers caused by the transmission of risk taking among banks. For this purpose, we use spatial econometrics. Our results support a negative relation between risk taking and market power. The transmission of risk taking causes significant geographical spillovers, which increases the magnitude of the relation under analysis here.

This research estimates an ordered probit model with data from the 2014 LAPOP survey to explore the factors that explain confidence in institutions in Chile. Results show an increased lack of confidence from the original peoples toward security institutions, probably due to the Mapuche Conflict. There is also a positive effect of democracy and performance variables that unveils differences in responsibilities between the executive power and the municipalities.