Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The expired patent pharmaceutical market has an interesting behavior with respect to its market structure, changing from a monopolistic case derived from patent protection to an oligopoly, where the company that had such protection (pioneer) holds the dominant role through a Stackelberg behavior, which applies strategies of product differentiation in a segmented market, which is not very sensitive to change in prices and which retains a non-negligible share. In this sense, other companies that manufacture generics with a commercial brand, penetrate the market with a similar strategy with differentiated products and lower prices. This is due to the prestige and competitive positioning of the product with recent expiration. Consequently, little differentiated products are offered that compete for economic prices, which obtain a considerable market penetration in a price-sensitive segment. This behavior explains the variation in drug prices. The strategies that stand out are the dosages, the prestige of the product through a brand and the line of presentations, looking for imperfect price behavior and similar to the generic paradox, where public policy has the capacity to reduce such fluctuations in the search for economic options for the population.

The objective of this work is to show the working indicators in a group of activities called knowledge-intensive services that includes administration, health, education, finance, arts, computing, etc. Due to their specialization, they are provided by trained personnel and are a source of high added value. Despite their importance, studies that reveal the conditions of these knowledge workers are lacking. An exploratory, descriptive and comparative study is carried out between Argentina and Mexico, since they have an important service sector. It was found that the workers of this group of specialized services have a greater presence in Argentina, as well as better conditions in terms of salary, working hours and gender equality.

The aim of this article is both to analyze the determinants of the probability of demanding paid domestic work (PDW), and to estimate the demand of the households for these services. Given that that the majority of the domestic workers are in the cities, we are going to analyze this demand in the urbane area. We will work with the Encuesta Nacional de Uso del Tiempo (ENNUT) and the Encuesta Nacional de Hogares (ENAHO), for the years 2010, and with the ENAHO 2016. Regarding the probability of hiring domestic paid work, we find that even if the demand for live—in domestic work is falling if compared with live—out domestic work, that type of arrangement subsists for «older» and richer households, while the younger household hire mostly live—out paid domestic workers. We also find that higher labor and non—labor earnings have a positive effect on the probability of hiring PDW in relation to not hiring it, and the marginal effects of the labor earnings of the spouse are higher for live—in workers, and the effect is the opposite for live – out workers. Regarding the demand of paid domestic work, we find that the hours demanded have a negative relation with the wage paid to the domestic worker and a positive relation with the family earnings. More so, there is a substitution effect between the domestic work done by the members of the household and the hours worked by the paid domestic workers. Additionally, the presence of women in the household reduces the hours of live—in paid housework demanded. Finally, the labor journey is longer if the employer lives in Lima Metropolitana, which is related to the fact that the capital city is the greatest market for paid housework in Peru, and also where the majority of these workers are.

It is a fact well documented by economic theory that high and durable inflation has a negative effect on economic growth, but that as the effects on the latter decline, they are non-linear. This work answers two research questions related to the works that have studied this empirical relationship in the last three decades. The first is about its external validity: How useful are they to predict the economic evolution of emerging countries? Simulating the growth of a sample of emerging markets for the past 20 years from these models, we found high and disparate prediction errors and therefore certain drawbacks when generalizing their conclusions. Understanding why this happens gives rise to the second question, linked to the internal validity of the models: What unresolved problems exist in the estimates carried out by the authors? the answer is that there are problems of specification, simultaneity and omission of variables, which generate endogeneity and hinder the causal identification of the effect of inflation on growth in the type of regressions under analysis, even in models with thresholds and non-linear.

Many governments have lower taxes and simplifiy regulatory requirements as a way to reduce the number of small firms operating in an informal manner. However, the impact has been slim. We postulate that the informal networks in which many of these firms operate can explain this result. To support our claim, we first build a theoretical model to describe why informality not only depends on the regulatory costs. Next, we use the 2012 Mexican National Survey of Microenterprises to show that its financial networks, and how formal its commercial partners are—once potential endogeneity is acounted for—features that are correlated with how firms are managed. While those that wish to avoid the administrative and/or financial burden of regulation may well be induced to become more formal if regulatory costs are reduced, for many others it is not necessarily regulatory costs, but rather, the benefits to be reaped by becoming formal.

The aim of this paper is to provide a model where altruism is determined endogenously. Altruism is an attitude that influences our actions toward other people. The model presented in this paper assumes that this influence also operates in the opposite direction via reciprocity: that is, people modify their altruism based on the actions of other agents. The paper uses a dynamic setup with two agents whose incomes are random. Depending on the incomes realized, transfers are made. These transfers convey information about the level of altruism of the donors. The agents use this information to adjust their own level of altruism. If the transfer received by an agent implies that the altruism level of the other agent is higher (lower) than that of the receiver, then the latter will increase (decrease) his level of altruism. This behavior induces a stochastic process for the levels of altruism. The long level of altruism is studied using both analytic and computer simulations tools.