Guillermo Vuletin es Economista Senior del Banco Mundial, PhD en Economía por la Universidad de Maryland y Licenciado y Magister en Economía por la UNLP. Su área de investigación es la política fiscal y monetaria, con un interés particular en política macroeconómica en países emergentes y en desarrollo. Su trabajo ha sido publicado en diversas revistas académicas: Journal of Monetary Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Development Economics, entre otros.

Abstract: This paper estimates the macroeconomic effects of social transfer payments to individuals for a sample of 23 developed and Latin American countries. We find that the social transfer multiplier is 0.3 in developed countries, but 0.9 in Latin American economies. We study the role of hand-to-mouth consumers, which have no access to financial markets and a high marginal propensity to consume, as a first order factor to explain the heterogeneity in the size of social transfer multipliers. Using survey-based data from the Global Findex dataset, we first find that the average share of the population living hand-to-mouth is 23% in developed economies versus 60% in Latin American countries. We interpret this evidence with a two-agent New Keynesian model. We find that the difference on the share of hand-to-mouth consumers is able to explain 80%-90% of the difference in the estimated social transfer multipliers. We also document that the share of hand-to-mouth individuals in emerging countries is in general 47% which suggests that a larger social transfer multiplier may be expected for this type of economies.

Autores: Jessica Bracco (CEDLAS-IIE-FCE-UNLP), Luciana Galeano (University of Michigan), Pedro Juarros (Georgetown University), Daniel Riera-Crichton (Banco Mundial) y Guillermo Vuletin (Banco Mundial).

Organizaron: Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas, Departamento de Economía y Revista Económica.