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The increased volatility of commodity prices caused by the entry of financial investors within the framework of so-called financialization, makes macroeconomic management more complex, especially for economies with a high incidence of primary products in their international trade. The purpose of this paper is to measure the exposure to export price risk for the Argentine case during the 1993-2018 period. The Value at Risk (VaR), typically used in finance, is employed in a novel way to design an export portfolio of commodities that operate daily in international markets. Among the main results is that 2.90% of the total exported is exposed to a monthly price risk from 2004 to 2018 in Argentina compared to 1.73% registered between 1993 and 2003. This indicator contributes to the design of fiscal rules that allow planning expenses based on structural income in contexts of high volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is much debate around whether labor informality reflects situations of exclusion or whether it constitutes a valuable alternative for those who work in this sector. This paper contributes to the discussion by comparing the characteristics of those who move from the formal to the informal sector with the characteristics of those who remain in formal sector jobs during the 1995-2019 period in Argentina. Multinomial choice models are used for this purpose. The influence of such movements on the variation of wages is also evaluated. Both sets of evidence reveal that the positions in the informal sector, taken as a whole, do not seem to constitute a desirable destination for those who work in the formal sector. However, there is also evidence of heterogeneity in the informal sector, since the profile of those who move to one of its segments -that of employers- is consistent with the idea of voluntariness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically analyzes the incidence of productive diversification on regional performance in Argentina between 2008 and 2018. Assuming that spillovers between productive activities requires proximity in the knowledge base, a distinction is made between related and unrelated productive diversification, which are estimated using entropy indicators. Econometric estimations are performed to explain the dynamics of employment and wages (as proxy for productivity) by the levels of related and unrelated regional diversification. Findings suggest that related diversification has a positive impact on employment and wage dynamics at the regional level, while unrelated diversification contributes to maintaining regional employment during macroeconomic contractions. No empirical evidence is found supporting that general purpose technology (such as mechanical engineering and ICTs) enhances the effects of related diversification on regional performance. It is observed, however, that the software sector enables the presence of externalities between technologically distant activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]