This paper uses 113 household surveys from 18 Latin American countries to document patterns in secondary school graduation rates over the period 1990–2010. It is found that enrollment and graduation rates increased dramatically during that period, while dropout rates decreased. Two...

This paper focuses on two research problems. The first is to measure the direct impacts of innovation support measures in Brazil, and the second is to test the hypothesis of indirect effects of innovation policies on non-beneficiary firms through the labor mobility channel, whether resulting...

The literature on taxes and public finance generally focuses on revenues, an easily observable and generally available variable, as the observable measure of tax policy. Still, revenues depend on many determinants other than the political will and policy objectives of the government. It is...

The increased occurrence of extreme weather conditions leading to drought is a key development challenge. This paper studies how these extreme events interact with the political process at the local level using rich administrative data for drought declarations and mayoral elections in Brazil....

Climate change mitigation policies have begun to be discussed in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries in recent years. However, the economic effects of such policies - i. e. , winners and losers - may vary significantly across countries. This paper attempts to shed light on some of these...

This paper shows that bank linkages have a positive effect on international trade. A global banking network (GBN) is constructed at the bank level, using individual syndicated loan data from Loan Analytics for 1990-2007. Network distance between bank pairs is computed and aggregated to country...

Although recent research has shed new light on the political determinants and economic consequences of tax lawmaking, existing analyses rely on coarse data measuring political aggregates. Consequently, little is known about the political processes determining how tax legislation is written or...

This paper proposes a new taxonomy of Sudden Stops comprised of seven categories with definitions depending on the behavior of gross and net capital flows. The incidence of different types of Sudden Stops is tracked over time and the type of Sudden Stop related to economic performance. Sudden...

This paper examines how the adoption of the Australian ballot (AB), and ipso facto, the transition from the nominal to effective secret vote, shaped the nature of party politics in Brazil. Engaging the literature on political clientelism, the impact of the AB on three outcomes is studied: 1) the...

According to an influential theoretical argument, presidential systems tend to present smaller governments because the separation between those who decide the size of the fiscal purse and those who allocate it creates incentives for lower public expenditures. In practice, forms of government...