Santiago Pinto | Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (original) (raw)

Papers by Santiago Pinto

Congressional districts are political entities with heterogeneous trade policy preferences due to... more Congressional districts are political entities with heterogeneous trade policy preferences due to their diverse economic structures. Representation of these interests in the legislature is a crucial aspect of trade policy-making that has been missing in the canonical political economy models of trade. This paper attempts to restore the place that districts occupy in these models by proposing a regional specific factor model. The aggregation of heterogeneous district preferences into a national trade policy creates regional political winners and losers, which are central to the politics of trade but earlier models cannot capture. Using data from 435 Congressional districts in the U.S. at a time when the structure of the U.S. economy was dramatically transformed by trade, we estimate welfare weights implied by the vector of tariff and non-tariff measures enacted at the national level. The estimates offer a supply-side explanation for trade policy that, while complementing Grossman and...

Illegal Immigration and Fiscal Competition * Reflecting recent enforcement policy activism of US ... more Illegal Immigration and Fiscal Competition * Reflecting recent enforcement policy activism of US states, this paper examines federal-state overlap of illegal immigration policy in a spatial context. Keeping the US-Mexico context in mind, we assume that labor from a source nation enters a host nation through bordering states. Once in the host, illegal immigrants may stay in the state of entry or move to another state. The host nation's federal government and/or the state governments choose border and internal enforcement policies, and also provide local goods. As a benchmark, we define the completely centralized solution as the case where the federal government chooses all the policies, while the state governments are passive. At higher levels of decentralization (i.e., as states take more responsibility in deciding some of the policies), the overlap of federal and state policies is associated with both vertical and horizontal externalities. Among other results, we find that if ...

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwe... more Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S

Senior policy economist Santiago Pinto and economics writer Tim Sablik discuss the forces that dr... more Senior policy economist Santiago Pinto and economics writer Tim Sablik discuss the forces that drive urbanization and the factors that determine where firms and households locate within cities. Pinto and Sablik also evaluate a variety of place-based and people-based policy responses to urban decline. Because every city is different, the authors caution that revitalization efforts that worked for one city may not work for another.

The Regional Economist, 2015

Much is known about the effects of unauthorized immigration on the nation as a whole. But little ... more Much is known about the effects of unauthorized immigration on the nation as a whole. But little research has been done so far on the impact of states’ efforts to curb the influx—efforts such as the E-Verify program.

Handbook of Real Estate and Macroeconomics

Three Essays on Relationship between the Public Sector and Population Migration

Land and housing can be costly in a city or region for a number of possible reasons. Places with ... more Land and housing can be costly in a city or region for a number of possible reasons. Places with recreational or cultural attractions or other amenities draw population so the demand for housing and, consequently, land is high in those areas. Prices could also be high at some locations if the supply of land is constrained by the geography. In some areas, however, the price of land is high as the result of heavy land-use regulations (LURs), which restrict the availability of houses.

We model the formation of the international investment regime as a network formation process wher... more We model the formation of the international investment regime as a network formation process where nodes (countries) choose which arcs to add (treaties to sign). The provisions of investment treaties are modeled as an enforcement technology that has the potential to increase the returns, and reduce the costs and risk of investing abroad. We model investment decisions as a mean-variance optimization process, explicitly accounting for the home-country bias in investment documented in the empirical literature. In deciding which treaties to sign, governments internalize the potential aggregate and distributive consequences of inward and outward investment. Signing investment treaties affects the mean and variance of the return to investment among signatory, and non-signatory parties. In equilibrium –when all potentially beneficial agreements have been signed and the network reaches a level of saturation– the signing and ratification of BITs would be consistent with a limited reallocatio...

For decades, free trade was advocated as the vehicle for peace, prosperity, and democracy in an i... more For decades, free trade was advocated as the vehicle for peace, prosperity, and democracy in an increasingly globalized market. More recently, the proliferation of foreign direct investment has raised questions about its impact upon local economies and politics. Here, seven scholars bring together their wide-ranging expertise to investigate the factors that determine the attractiveness of a locale to investors and the extent of their political power. Multinational corporations prefer to invest where legal and political institutions support the rule of law, protections for property rights, and democratic processes. Corporate influence on local institutions, in turn, depends upon the relative power of other players and the types of policies at issue.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015

Richmond Fed Economic Brief, 2018

Immigration has been the subject of intense debate recently in the United States and in Europe. E... more Immigration has been the subject of intense debate recently in the United States and in Europe. Economists have studied unauthorized immigration to better understand what motivates immigrants to move and what effects they have on domestic workers and the domestic economy. Incorporating this research into a model suggests that centralized enforcement of immigration policies may be more effective than a decentralized approach.

Illegal Immigration and Fiscal Competition Reflecting recent enforcement policy activism of US st... more Illegal Immigration and Fiscal Competition Reflecting recent enforcement policy activism of US states, this paper examines federal-state overlap of illegal immigration policy in a spatial context. Keeping the US-Mexico context in mind, we assume that labor from a source nation enters a host nation through bordering states. Once in the host, illegal immigrants may stay in the state of entry or move to another state. The host nation’s federal government and/or the state governments choose border and internal enforcement policies, and also provide local goods. As a benchmark, we define the completely centralized solution as the case where the federal government chooses all the policies, while the state governments are passive. At higher levels of decentralization (i.e., as states take more responsibility in deciding some of the policies), the overlap of federal and state policies is associated with both vertical and horizontal externalities. Among other results, we find that if inter-s...

Richmond Fed Economic Brief, 2017

In recent decades, a number of once-prominent U.S. cities have experienced economic hardship and ... more In recent decades, a number of once-prominent U.S. cities have experienced economic hardship and significant population loss. Policymakers in those cities want to jump-start growth and improve prospects for the people who live there. But where should they begin? This Economic Brief surveys economic studies on a variety of urban policy interventions and provides lessons for policymakers.

Why does the implementation of urban policies with similar characteristics achieve disparate resu... more Why does the implementation of urban policies with similar characteristics achieve disparate results? Why do the same policies work in certain social and economic environments, but not in others? What are the reasons explaining the varied outcomes? This presentation claims that social interactions, including neighborhood and network effects, may play a key role at explaining the effectiveness of urban policies. It is argued that the availability of new and better information, such as recent data obtained from social experiments, might provide new insights on how non-market interactions may condition policy interventions in an urban setting.