| In the first essay I present a general equilibrium model of the Dutch Disease (DD) hypothesis. Because mining booms produce important income effects in these economies, I focus on the indirect effects of natural resource booms. The model explicitly introduces preferences for leisure and tradable and non-tradable goods. Once these elements are introduced, the Dutch Disease prediction that mining booms adversely affects manufacturing becomes a special case that requires strong assumptions about technology, consumer preferences and relative prices.; In the second essay I test the Dutch Disease and Resource Curse (RC) hypotheses for 44 mining countries during 1960 and 1998. Correlations and causality tests confirm mining booms are not related negatively to manufacture or agriculture (DD) and economic growth (RC) for most mining countries. These results are also confirmed using a panel data set and appropriate econometric techniques.; In the third essay I study the Chilean copper industry. The objective is to evaluate traditional marketing techniques used before 1988 against marketing strategies that use futures to change the settlement price of copper contracts. Two Chilean state-owned firms and four private subsidiaries of multinational firms are compared for the period between 1990 and 1998. The results show that the use of futures could increase Codelco's revenue by 0.13 percent, and Escondida's revenue by 0.26 percent. However, these firms have other instruments, for instance universal premium, that give higher revenue increments than the use of futures. |
