The effectiveness of exchange rate adjustments depends critically on the extent to which depreciations "pass through" to inflation, an effect that is known as exchange rate pass-through (ERPT). In particular, if an exchange rate depreciation does not result in a lasting change in relative...

Results from a new experiment shed light on the effects of voter information on vote buying and incumbent advantage. The treatment provided voters with information about a major spending program and the proposed allocations and promises of mayoral candidates just prior to municipal elections. It...

This study explores sex differences in language and socio-emotional skills. It focuses on children 7 months old to 6 years old in Chile in 2012 and Nicaragua in 2013. A focus on young children allowed for ruling out a set of environmental and identity effects to explain the gap. Females had an...

This paper examines the evolution of the cyclicality of real wages and employment in four Latin American economies (Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico) during the period 1980-2010. Wages are highly pro-cyclical during the 1980s and early 1990s, a period characterized by high inflation. As...

This paper presents findings from the Regional Project on Child Development Indicators, PRIDI for its acronym in Spanish. PRIDI created a new tool, the Engle Scale, for evaluating development in children aged 24 to 59 months in four domains: cognition, language and communication, socio-emotional...

A surprisingly large number of countries have been able to finance a significant fraction of domestic investment using foreign finance for extended periods. While many of these episodes are in low-income countries where official finance is more important than private finance, this paper also...

This paper studies the influence of external financial factors on economic activity in emerging economies (EMEs) motivated by a considerable increase in foreign financing by the corporate sector in EMEs since the early 2000s, mainly in the form of bond issuance. A quarterly external financial...

Corporate sectors in emerging markets have noticeably increased their reliance on foreign financing, presumably reflecting low global interest rates. The evidence also shows a rebalancing from bank loans towards bonds. To study these developments, this paper develops a dynamic open economy model...

In low- and middle-income countries (LIMCs) measuring early childhood development (ECD) with standard tests in large scale surveys (i.e. evaluations of interventions) is difficult and expensive. Multi-dimensional screeners and single-domain tests ('short tests') are frequently used as...