Una de las primeras cosas que aprendí en el curso introductorio de economía fue a diferenciar entre necesidad y demanda (como el resto de los seres humanos los africanos necesitan alimentarse, pero no demandan alimentos porque no tienen con qué pagarlos).

Esta diferencia vino a mi memoria porque en las líneas que siguen quiero diferenciar entre aquellas labores que a los economistas nos permiten ganarnos la vida (demanda), y la “misión” que tenemos en esta Tierra (necesidad).

We develop the implications of political budget cycles for real exchange rates in a two-sector small open economy with a cash-in-advance constraint. Policy makers are office motivated politicians. Voters have incomplete information on the competence and the opportunism of incumbents. Devaluation acts like a tax, and is politically costly because it can signal the government is incompetent. This provides incumbents an incentive to postpone a devaluation, and can lead to an overvalued exchange rate before elections.

It is our purpose here to show the deep relationship between differential rates and their underlying information sets. To accomplish our task, we will make for the following stages: In the first place, we deal with scaled changes along a period and conditional rates of change within a discrete environment. Next, rings and algebras of sets are addressed, so as to provide information sets with a suitable structure and give grounds to differential rates.

The aim of this paper is to conciliate some conclusions of the economic theories of breach of contract and tort law. The main result is that the two efficient alternatives that tort law identifies (negligence rule and strict liability with a defense of contributory negligence) are mirrored by two efficient ways of defining contract damages. The first consists of forcing the debtor to pay expectation damages but limiting the level of the creditor’s reliance (rule of damage mitigation).

This paper proposes theory and evidence on the relationship between in°ation and the bank's portfolio allocation. The proposed idea rationalized what Rodriguez (1992) pointed out with respect to the Central Bank of Argentina, behaving as a "borrower of ¯rst resort", where banks reallocated their investment from the private sector to government bonds. A main component of in°ation costs is the misallocation of resources, this paper shows a channel through the reallocation of credits, where the credit market for the private sector trend to disappear.