arXiv subjects

Ricardo Alonzo Fernandez Salguero

Publications and source records attributed to Ricardo Alonzo Fernandez Salguero.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Stabilization without Inclusive Development: Neoliberalism, Economic Liberalization, Poverty, and Inequality in Bolivia

This article reconstructs the economic and social history of Bolivian neoliberalism and evaluates whether economic liberalization reduced or increased poverty and inequality in Bolivia. The historical argument is that the Bolivian neoliberal cycle was not a single event but a layered sequence: hyperinflation and emergency stabilization, the 1985 New Economic Policy, labor displacement and mining restructuring, second-generation reform in the 1990s, capitalization, decentralized state restructuring, commodity dependence, and the social conflicts that culminated in the collapse of the party system. The empirical contribution is to integrate macroeconomic indicators, economic-freedom indices, poverty and inequality series, IMF and financial-reform data, commodity and disaster controls, Bolivian export aggregates, and harmonized historical survey indicators. The preferred design is a heterogeneous instrumental-variables model that instruments domestic liberalization with lagged regional leave-one-out policy diffusion and allows Bolivia to differ from the Latin American average. The central estimate is that a 10-point increase in the Heritage economic-freedom score is associated, for Bolivia, with approximately +4.46 percentage points of poverty at the USD 4.20/day line, +3.61 percentage points at the USD 3/day line, +7.40 percentage points at the USD 8.30/day line, and +3.91 Gini points. These results remain socially regressive in sign after adding export-structure controls to the poverty specifications, although the causal interpretation remains conditional on the exclusion restriction. The article therefore advances a qualified conclusion: Bolivian neoliberalism stabilized hyperinflation, but the historically specific liberalization package appears to have increased social vulnerability and inequality rather than producing inclusive development.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2026

Fiscal Aggregation and the Limits of IS--LM--BP: Derivations, Aggregation Bias and Reproducible Adversarial Simulations

This paper develops a formal critique of scalar fiscal aggregation in the IS LM BP/Mundell Fleming framework. It shows that when fiscal policy is composed of heterogeneous instruments current purchases, public investment and transfers to different households the aggregate variable G is sufficient for output analysis only under a restrictive gradient condition: all instruments must have identical marginal effects on output. The paper proves this condition, derives composition weighted multipliers, identifies aggregation bias and extends the open economy IS LM BP model to incorporate fiscal composition, public capital, debt dynamics and risk-premium effects. A reproducible computational exercise with symbolic checks, derivative tests, accounting identities, adversarial counterexamples, sensitivity sweeps, Monte Carlo simulations and stress tests confirms the internal consistency of the argument. The contribution is methodological: IS LM BP remains useful as a compact equilibrium framework, but fiscal policy analysis requires vector-valued instruments and state-contingent multipliers rather than a single homogeneous spending variable.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

Integrated analysis of informality, minimum wage, and monopsony power: A synthesis of meta-analyses with unified theoretical underpinnings

This document offers a synthesis of recent economic literature on three interconnected areas of labor markets: informality, the effects of the minimum wage, and monopsony power. Through the consolidation and meta-analysis of findings from multiple existing systematic reviews and meta-analyses, their causes, consequences, and associated public policies are examined. It is concluded that conventional views on these topics often overestimate the magnitude of effects. Policies to reduce informality based solely on lowering formalization costs are largely ineffective, while increased enforcement at the extensive margin shows more promising results. The effects of the minimum wage on employment, measured through the own-wage elasticity (OWE), are consistently modest, suggesting that job losses are limited compared to wage gains. To reconcile and microfound these findings, an integrated theoretical model of firm optimization is introduced, simultaneously incorporating firm heterogeneity, monopsony power, and endogenous formality decisions, rigorously demonstrating how the interaction of these forces can explain the observed empirical regularities. A cross-cutting and significant finding is the omnipresence of publication bias across all these study areas, which tends to inflate the magnitude of the effects reported in the published literature. Corrected estimates of the effects generally approach zero. Meta-regression is established as an indispensable tool for identifying heterogeneity and the true underlying effects in the empirical evidence, compelling a recalibration of both theory and economic policy recommendations towards a more nuanced and integrated approach.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

An Analysis of Monetary Policy Evidence and Theory through Meta-Analyses

This paper offers a synthesis of the empirical literature on the effects of monetary policy. Using the findings from an extensive collection of meta-analyses, it evaluates the effectiveness of conventional and unconventional monetary policy instruments on key macroeconomic variables such as output, inflation, capital flows, and the exchange rate. The aggregated evidence reveals a systematic gap between the effects reported in primary studies and the actual magnitude of these effects, once corrected for publication bias and methodological heterogeneity. The findings suggest that, while monetary policy is a relevant tool, its power to modulate the business cycle has been consistently overestimated in the literature. Contextual factors - such as the degree of financial development, the exchange rate regime, central bank independence, and crisis conditions - that modulate the transmission of monetary policy are identified. In particular, it is found that publication bias systematically favors statistically significant results consistent with predominant theory, which artificially inflates the perception of effectiveness. By correcting these distortions, a picture of monetary policy emerges with more modest, uncertain effects and considerable lags, which has profound implications for macroeconomic theory and the practice of economic policy.

econ.TH↗