In this paper, I discuss the reasons for Costa Rica's economic performance over the last quarter of a century. Three complementary sets of policies (investments in human capital, careful stabilization, and an intelligent and aggressive integration into the world economy) explain the successful...

The empirical literature addressing links between the labor and the marriage markets is numerous and varied. Despite this, the theoretical (equilibrium) literature that explicitly links the two markets is less developed, particularly so with frictional markets. We build an equilibrium search...

This paper explores the development of public sector capabilities for Productive Development Policies in Costa Rica through four case studies of successful experiences, with less successful cases presented as counterfactuals. To some extent the paper tests the Technical, Organizational and...

This paper summarizes the findings of the recent Inter-American Development Bank book Two to Tango: Public-Private Collaboration Productive Development Policies, based on case studies of 25 productive development policies (PDPs) in five countries and discusses an additional example from Peru....

We analyse an equilibrium labour market with on-the-job search and experience effects (where workers learn-by-doing). The analysis yields a standard Mincer wage equation with worker fixed effects and endogenously determined firm fixed effects. It shows that learning-by-doing increases...

In this paper we develop and quantitatively assess a tractable equilibrium search model of the labour market to analyse the long-term wage costs of a job loss. In our framework, these costs occur due to losses in workers' human capital and firm specific compensation, interruptions to workers'...

This paper investigates equilibria in a labor market where firms post wage/tenure contracts and risk-averse workers, both employed and unemployed, search for better paid job opportunities. Different firms typically offer different contracts. Workers accumulate general human capital through...

Considerable evidence demonstrates that significant dispersion exists in the prices charged for seemingly homogeneous goods. This paper adopts a simple, flexible equilibrium model of search to investigate the way the market structure influences price dispersion. Using the noisy search approach,...