This paper analyzes the impact of land titling on child health. The empirical evaluation of the effect of property rights typically suffers from selection problems. The paper addresses the selection issue by exploiting a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles. Twenty years ago, a...

Using quarterly (annual) information on consumption and prices of non-tradable goods for the period 1980-2002 (1981-2001), this paper estimates the elasticity of substitution in demand for non-tradable goods in Costa Rica. The unit root and cointegration properties of the time series are tested,...

This paper uses a CES function to estimate the constant elasticity of substitution in consumption for non-tradables relative to tradables in a dependent economy framework. The methodology for generating data on real consumption of tradable and non-tradable goods, real prices of tradable and...

Privatization is under attack. Criticisms run from corrupt deals to abuse of market power and social welfare losses. We evaluate the empirical record on privatization relying on recent comprehensive studies from Latin America. There are four main results. First, the increased profitability of...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the elasticity of substitution in the demand for non-tradable goods relative to tradable goods in Argentina. This parameter plays a crucial role in the analysis of the macroeconomic equilibrium of a small open economy (Mendoza, Galindo and Izquierdo,...

This paper examines how the main characteristics of Argentina's policymaking process (PMP) affect the productivity of its economy using the conceptual framework presented in Murillo, Scartascini and Tommasi (2008), Stein et al. (2008), Spiller and Tommasi (2007), and IDB (2005). First, the paper...

The authors present matching estimators of the impact on earnings for individuals who attended public and private job training programs in Colombia. They estimate propensity scores by controlling for the variety of personal and socioeconomic background variables of those individuals. The effect...

This paper evaluates Programa Joven, a training program conducted by Argentina`s Ministerio del Trabajo. The paper adapts and applies a non-experimental evaluation methodology to answer the following questions: (1) Did Programa Joven increase the labor income of the trainees? (2) Did Programa...

In the nearly ten years since Peru privatized major State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), the overall impact of the process is not yet clear. This paper analyzes the impact of privatization through a detailed statistical and econometric analysis of first difference (the difference between pre- and...

This paper investigates the inter-relation between the central government and the municipalities in Costa Rica. It examines episodes in which the central government has bailed out the local governments from their obligations. We employ empirical and descriptive methods to show how discretionary...