Do individuals trust experts' advice? Does the sector represented by these experts matter for trust and compliance? Do individuals prefer the public or the private sector for large-scale responses to events such as the pandemic? We answer these questions by means of a large-scale survey on a...

We examine the impact of changes in local labor market concentration on two components of income inequality in Mexico: local wage shares and labor income inequality. Combining data from the Economic Census and the Population and Housing Censuses, we analyze the mechanisms that drive the...

The present study analyzes the relationship between energy transition and job creation potential in Latin America. It looks at companies' characteristics to infer potential hiring process drivers in forthcoming years. The analysis is based on an econometric model applied to cross-sectional data...

This article relies on a large-scale field experiment in Mexico to measure the effects of two ability-grouping models (tracking and heterogeneous/bimodal groups) on student learning outcomes during middle school. Both strategies yielded an average learning gain of 0.08 of a standard deviation....

This paper explores the effects of weather-induced rural-urban migration on urban labor and housing markets in Brazil. In order to identify causal effects, it uses weather shocks to the rural municipalities of origin of migrants. We show that larger migration shocks led to an increase in...

By exploiting spatial variation in import exposure arising from initial differences in industry specialization, we analyze how local labor markets in Mexico adjusted to increased Chinese-import competition over different time horizons. The initial adjustment to the shock took various forms: a...

We study the effects of a Bolivian law that introduced benefits and protections for child workers (who are overwhelmingly informal workers) and lowered the de facto legal working age from 14 to 10. We employ a difference-in-discontinuity approach that exploits the variation in the law's...

This paper presents the results of an impact evaluation, with an experimental design, which estimates the effect on learning math of a remote tutoring program offered to girls and boys aged 9-14 years in three departments of El Salvador. The program used low-tech interventions such as text...

As Latin America and the Caribbean bounce back from a sanitary crisis of historic proportions, the search is on for policies that can accelerate recovery while boosting longterm growth. In a scenario of tight fiscal constraints, trade and integration (T&I) policies seem to fit this description....

Governments can issue public debt for both good and bad reasons. The former include intertemporal tax smoothing, fiscal stimulus, and asset management. In contrast, the bad reasons, which generate higher indebtedness, are mainly associated with political cycles, rent capture, intergenerational...