Lautaro Chittaro

In frictionless financial markets, a carbon tax on energy users provides the same incentives as a replicating asset price schedule that depends on emissions. In particular, the replicating rate of return on a firm increases linearly in scope 1 emissions relative to enterprise value. We use this result to interpret pollution premia measured by recent empirical studies and conclude that markets currently provide only modest incentives. Replicating a serious carbon tax requires high returns in the right tail of the emission intensity distribution. With heterogeneous investors, such returns are not sustainable unless essentially everyone perceives large nonpecuniary costs from holding dirty capital. Substantial emission reductions can be achieved, however, when even a small share of investors perceive nonpecuniary benefits from owning clean electricity capital

We study the pricing of sovereign green bonds using Chile’s pioneering green bond program and its cross-design issuance. Employing a panel of Chilean U.S.-dollar bonds, we estimate no-arbitrage pricing kernels for green and conventional bonds. The results reveal a declining greenium across maturities, driven by the higher interest- rate risk exposure of green bonds. We find no evidence of investor segmentation or liquidity differences between green and conventional bonds. Instead, we explain the observed pricing patterns through a representative-agent asset-pricing model in which investors derive nonpecuniary benefits from the real value of their green bond holdings. During high-inflation periods, as observed in our sample, the real value of green bond portfolios deteriorates, making the convenience service they provide scarcer and more valuable. This positive correlation between green convenience yield and inflation generates a risk premium that compresses the greenium especially at longer maturities, producing a downward-sloping greenium term structure.

How costly are disruptions to activity at U.S. ports? To answer this question, we estimate a model of demand for importers of different types of products who choose which maritime port (if any) to use for their container imports. Our estimator leverages a nearly comprehensive panel of maritime imports to the U.S. between 2020 and 2025, linking customs records, granular GPS pings from container-shipping fleets, origin-destination-level shipping prices, and a number of additional data sources. Using variation in prices and processing times from localized slowdowns and disruptions at different ports, our model rationalizes importers’ port choices as a function of daily origin-destination prices, travel time at sea and on land, port congestion, and sticky product-origin-destination preferences at the time of each shipment’s observed departure. Our estimates allow us to predict the economic incidence of a short-term disruption at a subset of ports, such as a general strike. We use this to discuss the potential of different policies to support supply chain resilience.

Policy responses to COVID-19 affected the dynamic of economic growth and labor markets worldwide, hitting economically harder on developing countries. These policies involved economic lockdowns that included the shutdown of the main statistical exercises, making it almost impossible to assess the breadth and variety of their effects. Using a phone survey, this paper examines the impact of the quarantine implemented in Venezuela on labor market outcomes. The identification strategy exploits the exogenous variation in the severity of the lockdown in different regions of the country. The main result indicates a 16.5 percentage points reduction in employment, while in regions with severe lockdowns the reduction has been 13.8 p.p. larger. In particular, the self-employed and informally employed were hard hit by the lockdown. To cope with this effect, households sold their productive assets, reduced their savings, sought for alternative income sources and looked for help from relatives. This paper does not find a differential effect on the number of COVID-19 cases in more severe lockdown settings. Results are robust to endogenous migration and alternative specifications.

The level of complexity and diversification that Argentina has achieved in its industry, and the high wages that prevail compared to other developing countries, make the challenge of international insertion to export differentiated products based on design, technology, and customization, anchored in quality as the pillar of differentiation. These products have a higher price than other more mass-produced and standardized products, allowing for the payment of higher wages. In this type of goods, technical efficiency is not necessarily the main driver of competitiveness, but rather the ability to design, produce, and market goods valued in the global market. However, this capacity requires acquiring knowledge about the functional or symbolic needs of the external demand, typically not easily codifiable, which is extremely difficult to obtain if the firm's activity is limited to a domestic market isolated from international competition.

Argentina has a low level of financial development that negatively affects the financing opportunities of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Using a panel of bank loans, we were able to characterize the financial situation of Argentine industrial SMEs during the period 2007-2016. The most notable aspect of the period is the increase in access to bank credit and the persistence of a majority of companies (53% of the total) with bank financing below $5,000 or nonexistent. Despite this widespread context of low bank financing, this study shows that exporters, ceteris paribus, have a better debt repayment performance than non-exporters. We estimate a gap in the incidence of delinquency of more than 90 days between 2.88 and 1.20 percentage points, depending on the specification, between exporting and non-exporting companies. This gap may arise from the firm's ability to redirect its sales to different markets, allowing it to diversify its exposure to intrinsic demand shocks. This, to some extent, enables the firm to offset losses in the domestic market by redirecting sales to the external market. Additionally, this study seeks to estimate the causal effect of exporter status on the probability of default, using the firm's external demand as an instrument. However, the results show that the instrument is weak in providing evidence for or against this effect.