Essays on growth, labor markets and democracy

This dissertation studies economic growth, directly and indirectly, from three different perspectives: labor markets, financial markets, and social institutions. The issues addressed are the effect on labor markets of implementing an unemployment insurance system when eligibility is stochastic, the predictive power of sovereign spreads for future economic growth and inflation, and the impact of the democratic history of a country on economic growth.; The first chapter studies the quantitative effects on the labor market of implementing an unemployment insurance system in which not all unemployed are eligible for unemployment benefits, and moreover, eligibility is positively correlated with labor productivity. The main result is that higher benefits result on higher negotiated wages for the proportion of unemployed who are insured and lower wages for the uninsured. Moreover, the average behavior of the market is driven by the proportion of insured unemployed. Consequently, the standard results are obtained: higher benefits increase average unemployment, market tightness, average wages and unemployment duration.; The second chapter studies whether the spreads of sovereign bonds issued in international markets provide marginal information with which one can predict output growth and inflation. These instruments have only rarely been studied, especially in the context of emerging countries. The tests carried out for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Malaysia and Mexico show that, in most cases, spreads are useful as leading indicators for output growth. To a lesser extent, they are also useful for predicting inflation. The main contribution of the paper is to provide an alternative financial leading indicator for economies that lack indicators at the domestic level.; The third chapter proposes a particular way of thinking about the causal effect of social institutions and their impact on economic growth. The key insight is that institutions' effects cumulate over time. In contrast with the previous literature that found that current democracy plays little or no role in determining output growth this chapter shows that cumulative experience with democracy is a very significant factor. The tests are robust to several specifications, different measures of the stock of democracy and different samples.