Do creative industries have positive spillovers for the local economy in middle-income countries, for instance by attracting creative workers who benefit entrepreneurs and workers in other industries? Creative industries are considered highly innovative and productive and several studies in...

Ambient air pollution is a leading cause of death in developing countries. In theory, using smartphone apps, text messages, and other personal information and communication technologies to disseminate real-time information about such pollution can boost avoidance behavior like wearing face masks...

In this paper we explore the possible impact of urban congestion on agglomeration economies for a cross-section set of cities in Latin America. We use travel time data from Tom Tom to estimate wage regressions equations controlling for city size and congestion. We use population in each city in...

We conducted a paired correspondence experiment in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to measure the extent of labor market discrimination in hiring against slum dwellers. We sent 4,290 online pairs of fictitious job applications of otherwise observationally equivalent individuals who differed in a single...

Online Technical Appendix to "The Reorganization of Global Value Chains: What's in it for Latin America and the Caribbean?" It describes in more detail the data sources, the empirical strategy; and presents a series of robustness checks.

To assess the effects of an oil price bust on individual labor market outcomes, we leverage the 2015 exogenous decline in international oil prices with geographical variation in oil-dependency in Ecuador. To account for propagation mechanisms, we also test the causal effect of the oil price bust...

Does the growth of creative industries within a city yield both agglomeration effects (Marshallian externalities) as well as spillovers to the rest of the economy (Jacobian externalities, related to the novel combinations that can occur in cities with diversifted economic activities)? Most of...

This paper presents the results of a quasi-experimental study using information collected through a survey conducted in peri-urban areas of Metropolitan Lima between October and November 2021. The survey was applied to households residing close to and on both sides of the geographic boundary of...

It is unclear whether teachers with a degree in education are more effective than those who are not trained in an education-related field. To further examine this issue, we analyze the relationship between teachers' college major and student achievement by using unique data from Ecuador, which,...