The incidence of patronage can vary widely across levels of government within a country. We present evidence of this in the context of Brazil, which has been the focus of most recent research on patronage. In particular, we find that bureaucratic turnover follows political cycles among municipal...

We study the effects of an unexpected and large migration from Venezuela on Peruvian labor markets. From 2017 to 2019, about 800,000 Venezuelans migrated to Peru, with 84% settling in the Lima metropolitan area. The percentage of Venezuelans in the working age population in Lima increased from...

We estimate the monetary policy pass-through to lending rates in Brazil and the United States using the same methodology and obtain very different results. In the United States, the pass-through tends to be larger than 1:1. In Brazil, we find a 1:1 pass-through only in the case of non-earmarked...

Over the last three decades, Total Factor Productivity growth in Latin America has disappointed and informality persisted. To shed light on this outcome, we exploit a unique database (by Latin American standards) for Mexico, a country where manufacturing exports grew from 7 to 33 per cent of...

Between 2004 and 2018, the spread of wages in Mexico’s private labor sector remained stable. Nonetheless, the underlying factors behind salary dispersion underwent significant shifts nationally and regionally. We analyze a matched employer-employee dataset comprising the near-universe of...

This paper estimates intergenerational mobility in education, using data from 91 censuses in 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean spanning over half a century. It measures upward mobility as the likelihood that individuals will complete one educational stage more than their parents...

This work investigates the hypothesis of fiscal sustainability for 18 Latin American countries from 1991 to 2022. We applied a panel cointegration methodology to evaluate the existence of a long-term relationship between government revenue and expenditures, incorporating cross-sectional...

This paper studies the effects of aerial cable cars on mode of transport, time use, and employment in the metropolitan area of La Paz, Bolivia. Using an instrumental variables approach, we estimate local average treatment effects of cable car use for residents who use the system due to proximity...

This paper focuses on the significant growth of domestic credit once the debt is restructured, and shows that it is not correlated with the size of the haircut. Second, it performs an event study around Ecuador’s sovereign default and restructuring of 2008–2009 to study changes in domestic bank...

During 2021, most Latin American countries successfully deployed vaccines and their labor markets began to recover from the COVID-19 slump. Using two waves of the 2021 HFPS, we investigate the connection between immunization and employment recovery. We first show the highly uneven social impact...