Luis Alfredo Pino Sandoval

This paper investigates the ability of inflation targets to control inflation during the Asian and Subprime crises using the Chilean case. To this end, we use time-varying modeling to estimate inflation persistence from 1990 to 2022 through a Phillips-curve specification. Our results show that inflation targeting has effectively decreased persistence since this implementation began in the 1990s. Nevertheless, the Asian and Subprime crises introduced significant instability in inflation persistence. After the Asian crisis, inflation targeting effectively decreased persistence; however, this was not the case after the Subprime crisis. Therefore, our results suggest that the Subprime crisis had deep consequences on the ability of the Chilean monetary policy to control inflation.

Estudio del vínculo entre el Subsidio al Empleo Joven y las tasas de delitos comunales en Chile, con información del período 2013–2019.

This letter studies how copper price shocks spread across Chilean regions. Using annual real GDP for 13 regions over 2005–2025, spliced across three national accounts bases, and panel local projections, I compare regions with different pre-sample mining intensity. An unanticipated 10% rise in the copper price raises output by about 0.5–0.9% in both mining and non-mining regions during the first two years. The gains then fade in non-mining regions but persist and grow in mining regions, where output is 1.4% higher after four years. A one-standard-deviation higher mining share implies a response 0.3–0.5 percentage points larger three to four years after the shock. The pattern survives excluding the pandemic years, dropping Antofagasta and controlling for gold price shocks. Copper windfalls are shared nationally in the short run, but their medium-run gains concentrate where copper is mined.

We study how monetary policy shocks affect household consumption in Chile, a small open economy with inflation targeting, inflation-indexed mortgage debt and high labor informality. We identify policy shocks following Romer and Romer (2004): at each monetary policy meeting of the Central Bank of Chile between 2001 and 2019 we purge the decided change in the policy rate of its systematic response to the private-sector forecasts of inflation and activity reported in the Economic Expectations Survey. Local projections on national accounts show that a 100 basis point contractionary shock lowers real household consumption by 2.5% after two years and 3.6% after three years, with durable goods falling four times as much as non-durables and services. Using the Encuesta de Protección Social household panel, we find that the consumption of households in the bottom quintile of labor income is more sensitive to monetary policy than that of households in the top quintile: per percentage point of cumulated shock, the consumption growth of the richest fifth differs from that of the poorest fifth by 0.7 percentage points, in the direction of a milder contraction. We find no evidence of a mortgage cash-flow channel. Because the household panel offers only four wave-to-wave changes, we cannot separate these differential responses from differential exposure to the labor-market cycle that accompanies policy.

This letter asks whether the regional effects of monetary policy depend on the economic structure of neighbouring regions. I combine quarterly unemployment rates for Chile’s 16 regions (2012Q1–2026Q2) with market-based monetary policy surprises, measured as the change in the one-year swap rate around 140 scheduled policy meetings, and estimate spatial local projections of the SLX type with region-by-season and time fixed effects. Exposure is the pre-sample manufacturing share of regional output; spillovers are captured by the same share averaged over contiguous regions. A region’s own exposure does not change its unemployment response. The exposure of its neighbours does: after a 25 basis point surprise, unemployment rises by 0.8 percentage points more six quarters later in a region whose neighbours are one standard deviation more manufacturing-intensive. The combined effect of higher own and neighbours’ exposure is 0.56 percentage points after four quarters (wild bootstrapp = 0.06) and 0.64 after six. For a typical surprise of 4.5 basis points this is about 0.1 percentage points. The pattern holds with inverse-distance weights, without the pandemic years, without the Santiago region and with a broader interest-sensitive exposure, but not with 90-day swap surprises. Studies that rely on a region’s own structure may miss part of how monetary policy spreads across space.

This paper examines whether macroeconomic conditions are associated with poverty in South America after accounting for economic development and income inequality. Using an annual panel of nine countries over 2000–2024 (201 country-year observations), we estimate country fixed-effects models with a common time trend and compare inference based on country-clustered and Driscoll–Kraay standard errors; random-effects estimates are reported as a benchmark. Poverty is measured as the log headcount ratio at US$8.30 per person per day (2021 PPP), drawing on the World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform, combined with GDP data from the World Development Indicators and inflation data from CEPALSTAT. Across specifications, inequality is the strongest and most stable correlate of poverty: the coefficient on ln Gini remains large, positive, and highly significant. In the preferred fixed-effects specification with Driscoll–Kraay errors, inflation is positively associated with poverty (0.00173), whereas a stronger output gap is associated with lower poverty (-0.0174). GDP per capita enters negatively but less precisely, while the common time trend is negative and significant. These estimates are interpreted as conditional within-country associations rather than strict causal effects. The results suggest that durable poverty reduction requires not only growth and redistribution, but also price stability and countercyclical macroeconomic management.