The Spring 2014 Issue of Economia is now available at http://www.cid.harvard.edu/Economia/contents/contents_Spring%202014.html. The issue consists of four papers.

In the first paper, Rafael Romeu uses a gravity model and a counterfactual estimation to assess the impact of lifting restriction that prevent US tourists from vacationing in Cuba. Estimations find a major decline in US tourism flows to the Caribbean that, however, will be mitigated by a shift of tourists from other countries who are currently traveling to Cuba.

In the second paper, Andrea Bentancor and Virginia Robano study the part time premium for female workers in Chile and show that, after controlling for endogenity, the premium may actually become a penalty.

In the third paper, Danilo Coelho, Marcelo Fernandes, and Miguel Foguel study of gender differences in promotion, by analyzing differences between domestic and foreign-owned firms. Their findings indicate that, while high-end career promotions and wage increases in large manufacturing firms in Brazil are indeed less likely for women than men, this pattern is driven by domestic firms.

In the fourth paper, Eduardo Levy Yeyati and Tomas Williams argue that standard measure of financial globalization are biased and lead to an overestimation of the phenomenon. By assessing the evolution of financial globalization in emerging markets using alternative measures, the paper shows that over the last ten years financial globalization has grown only marginally. The authors also show that international portfolio diversification has actually been declining over time.

This blog post draws from the Editors’ summary of this issue of Economia. Economia, published twice a year, is the journal of LACEA. The journal publishes peer-reviewed research papers and reviews covering a range of topics in applied and empirical economics that are of policy relevance to Latin America. Economia’s emphasis is on rigorous applied quantitative work that uses modern analytical tools, including descriptive work using novel or underexploited databases. The journal currently ranks 53 among economics journals in Repec’s simple impact factor ranking (http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.journals.simple.html). It recently changed its editorial procedures to ensure faster response times to submitting authors. For details visit http://www.cid.harvard.edu/Economia/index.htm