Alejandro Montecinos

This profile was current as of 2015, when he was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

My name is Alejandro Montecinos. My wife Barbara and I came from Viña del Mar, Chile to South Bend, Indiana three years ago. I’m starting my fourth year at the Graduate Program of the Department of Economics here at ND. My main areas of expertise are Economic Theory and Development Economics.

Coming from a country with very high levels of wage and wealth inequality, and still with significant levels of poverty. A substantial part of Chile’s progress towards reducing poverty is due to geographically diversifying markets and improving the efficiency of extraction and production of natural resources, which have allowed to sustain high growth rates for more than twenty years. However this strategy has not been successful in reducing income inequality and in articulating the social changes induced by the economic growth process in the context of a market economy.

To face the challenges of an aspiring-to-be-developed country a necessary condition to truly achieve the status of developed country, countries like Chile require the generation of new ideas. This is why I’ve focused my research on idea/knowledge creation. Currently I’m working on two projects. One studies how initial cost asymmetries affect R&D investment and welfare differences between cooperative and non-cooperative R&D investment. The other project studies how private information affects the publication-productivity of an academic system. Besides knowledge creation, another common thread of these projects is studying economic incentives in non-market environments, thereby acknowledging that non market activities or institutions also play a crucial role in the innovation process.