Ambient air pollution is a serious problem in cities in south-central Chile because of massive combustion of wood as fuel for residential heating. To reduce air pollution emissions, Chile's environmental authority has implemented a large-scale program consisting of replacing old, highly...

This paper advances understanding of the relationship between tax policy and productivity, taking advantage of unique data from the Dominican Republic to document a significant negative impact of tax regulations on total factor productivity (TFP). It begins by estimating productivity using...

The efficient deployment of green technologies, and more generally, the clean energy transition, will require electricity tariff reforms. Existing tariff schemes often fail to achieve basic economic objectives. They set prices per unit that either exceed or fall short of the social marginal...

This paper examines the effects of skill advantages at age six on different types of parental investments, and long-run outcomes up to age 27. We exploit exogenous variation in skills due to school entry rules, combining 20 years of Chilean administrative records with a regression discontinuity...

Exploiting a unique empirical setting, 1,000 vendors in 90 traditional food markets in Lima, we document that historic social ties among market founders are associated, decades later, with stricter formal (third party) enforcement of market rules, more collective action, and the greater...

Most tax agencies use letters as the method of communicating with taxpayers. Still, other technologies exist that could be more effective. This paper reports the results of a field experiment conducted by the National Tax Agency of Colombia (DIAN), using phone calls to reduce tax delinquencies....

This paper develops a dynamic model of competitive equilibrium in electricity markets with thermal, hydro and intermittent power sources. Thermal generators have positive and increasing costs and use a marketable input. Hydro generators use a free and uncertain input, but one that is storable....

This paper studies the impact of import competition from China on informality and wages in the Peruvian manufacturing sector in 20012010. Using data from the Peruvian Household Survey, we use a two-step procedure to evaluate the impact of the surge in imports from China on the likelihood of...

This paper studies the impact that import competition from China had on firms performance in the manufacturing sector in Peru in 2005-2015. Using a firm-level dataset that covers the universe of firms in the formal sector, our results reveal that Peruvian firms reacted to increased competition...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of an intervention aimed at improving the reading skills of struggling third-grade students in Colombia. In a series of randomized experiments, students participated in remedial tutorials conducted during school hours in small groups. Trained teachers used...