This paper deals with human capital and firm-level performance in agriculture. In this sector firms are comparatively small. Management, capital provision and labor supply are concentrated on one individual and his immediate family. Many tasks have to be done, and decisions have to be worked out and carried through. Mistakes are made, not only on what crop variety to plant, but also on how much land and capital to allocate to different activities. Difficulty in decision-making is compounded by the impact of climatic variability on resource productivity.

In this paper we oversee the logic of information sets, firstly handling information and markets in perfect environments and, secondly, dealing with information and markets in imperfect environments, in the context of bounded rationality. Further on, asymmetric information is addressed together with the role of opportunistic behaviour through hidden action, hidden information, the free-rider problem and signaling, expanding on financial accounting and asymmetric information.

We know a thing when we understand it; and we understand it when we can interpret or tell what it signifies. Strictly, the sense knows nothing. We perceive indeed sounds by hearing, and characters by sight. But we are not therefore said to understand them. G. Berkeley 

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? T.S. Eliot

Previous results on political cycles as a signal of competency assumed that opportunism was common knowledge. If opportunism is not common knowledge, there may be a partially pooling equilibriumwhere cycles indicate oppotunism rather than competency. Insofar as mores discretionality increases the asymmetry of information, the possibility of cycles increases, and elections may become less effective to select competent incumbents.

"October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February." - Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson

"How could I have been so mistaken as to have trusted the experts?- John F. Kennedy, luego de Bahía de Cochinos 

"In investing money, the amount of interest you want should depend on wether you want to eat well or sleep well." - J. Kenfield Morley, Some Things I Believe

I develop a simple principaal agent model witah an Ego "component" in agentt´s utility function. The main result is that, when ability and effort are perfect substitutes in a job and the principal has superior information, it will be optimal for the principal to make the agent believe that he is high ability no matter whether if is true or not.That result is compatible with many firms "motivation" policies 

Desde que la leí, hace aproximadamente 4 décadas, esta afirmación incluída en la última página de la obra más famosa de Keynes, La teoría general, me encantó. Porque claro, me siento superior y más bueno si pienso que me ocupo de las ideas, que si creo que me ocupo de los intereses (de los míos, o de los de los otros); y si encima las ideas –particularmente las “correctas”, es decir, las mías- son más importantes que los intereses, entonces me parece que estoy viviendo en el mejor de los mundos. A propósito: hay cosas peores que los intereses.

In this paper, we introduce regime-switching in a two-factor stochastic volatility model to explain the behavior of short-term interest rates. The regime-switching stochastic volatility (RSV) process for interest rates is able to capture all possible exogenous shocks that could be either discrete, as occurring from possible changes in the underlying regime, or continuous in the form of `market-news' events. We estimate the model using a Gibbs Sampling based Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm that is robust to complex nonlinearities in the likelihood function.

This paper discusses dollarization from the perspective of the relation between country and devaluation risk. In the absence of balance sheet effects, we find that a full dollarization of an economy increases its country risk. On the other hand, when balance sheet effects are present, the full dollarization could reduce country risk. The link between these two risks is based on the government’s financial needs. In this paper government devalue the currency for fiscal purposes. Consequently, a full dollarization closes this avenue transferring the whole cost to bond holders.