This paper uses provincial-level data for Argentina to test for the causal relationship between electricity distribution and health. It examines the impact of privatization on two output measures: incidence of low birth weight and child mortality rates caused by food poisoning. Privatization...

This paper seeks to understand why political actors, institutions and legal reforms have systematically failed to produce cooperation in the Ecuadorian policymaking process. From a comparative and historical standpoint, Ecuador has been trapped in a cycle of low-quality public policies that fail...

Data sets used for evaluations in developing countries do not lend themselves to measuring the impact of training programs on the re-employment dynamics of trainees. An exception is a data set collected for an evaluation conducted in 1994 on participants in a training program targeting the...

This analysis characterizes the salient features of the policymaking process (PMP) in Chile. It emphasizes the influence of political institutions on the PMP and examines the linkage between policymaking and policy outcomes in Chile. The salient features of the Chilean PMP are the electoral...

This paper studies the separation of ownership and control for an average of 140 listed non-financial corporations in Colombia during the 1996-2002 period. Breaking down the sample according to corporations` listing status and economic activity shows that voting rights are greater than cash flow...

This paper examines corporate governance practices in Costa Rica. First, it estimates corporate governance charter measures using firm-level data for 87 Costa Rican firms and studies their impact on the firms` performance; here, the mean of the corporate governance charters for the publicly traded...

The aim of this study is to achieve a better understanding of corporate governance structures and mechanisms outside the United States by looking at a specific emerging economy: Venezuela. We first build a corporate governance practices index for publicly listed companies in this country; the...

Unlike outside investors, controlling groups have the option to trade on inside information and can exercise it at the expense of outside investors. This paper computes informed trading probabilities (ITPs) for the universe of liquid stocks from seven Latin American countries, trading both at...

This paper uses a transaction-costs framework to link the policymaking process (PMP) and the outer features of public policies in Mexico, a middle-income developing country. It shows how a highly secretive PMP, centralized around the presidency, fashioned nationalist policies that were stable,...

Although the Brazilian privatization program has been a sweeping endeavor involving more than 100 firms and billions of dollars, most of the studies have been published only in Brazil, and in Portuguese. This paper is the most comprehensive study to date in terms of the companies covered, and...