Heterogeneity in the impact of Covid-19 on the sales of microenterprises in Chile at the municipal level

The Covid-19 pandemic has had enormous consequences on the world's economy. During 2020, Chile was a country enormously affected by the number of infections with an unfavorable evolution of the pandemic at national level. This led the health's authority to decree on several occasions the confinement of the population, which consequently meant that many companies had to cease their functions. The objective of this paper is to analyze the existence of spatial heterogeneity in the determinants of the variation of microenterprise sales at the municipal level in Chile, with special emphasis on the effects of confinement and other sociodemographic variables. For this purpose, an adaptive kernel geographically weighted regression approach was used. The results show that there are negative effects of both the number of cases and confinement at the municipal level, with areas particularly affected in the center and north of the country. The results are a contribution to the understanding of how the pandemic affected microenterprises during 2020 and to the generation of strategies at the municipal level.

Contagion effect of the USA market on Latin American financial markets during the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper analyses the contagion effect on Latin American markets and the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic using the DCC-GARCH model. The main finding is the determination of the existence of a statistically significant contagion effect between the US and the markets of Chile, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil during the crisis period, implying that these markets were exposed to external shocks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Particularly, Mexico and Brazil have a stronger link to the U.S. market. In addition, the volatility of the U.S. market has a significant effect on the conditional correlations of the Latin American markets.