Using a hedonic residential rent model for Brazil's metropolitan areas calibrated with microdata from Brazil's annual household survey, this study estimates that increasing the sense of security in the home by one standard deviation would increase average home values by R$1,513 (US$757), or...

Violence has a striking gender pattern. Men are more likely to be attacked by a stranger, while women experience violence mostly from their partners. This paper estimates the costs of violence against women in terms of intangible outcomes, such as women’s reproductive health, labor supply, and...

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 explanations...

This paper estimates the impact of two productive development programs (PDPs) in Costa Rica: PROPYME and CR Provee. The first seeks to increase the capacity of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) to innovate, and the second aims to increase backward linkages between Costa Rican SMEs and...

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....

Tradable permit markets for carbon dioxide (C02) emissions respond to short-run fluctuations in economic activity. To provide stability, both price and quantity interventions have been proposed. This paper focuses on the relative performance of fixed versus intensity allowances in the presence...

Environmental taxes have been discussed as one of the main mechanisms to deal with environmental problems. Nonetheless, instruments of this type have rarely been implemented, and the adoption of new or higher environmental taxes has faced resistance in some countries. The purpose of this work is...

This paper assesses the effects of the Colombian Unemployment Subsidy (US), which includes benefits as well as training for some recipients. Using regression discontinuity and matching differences-in-differences estimators, the study finds that participation in the labor market, earnings of...