How are natives attitudes towards migrants shaped by economic crises? Natives could show more compassion towards migrants as everyone faces a common threat. Alternatively, natives prejudice could rise as competition for scarce economic opportunities increases. We conduct an online survey to...

We analyze shocks to productivity, collateral constraint (credit shock), firm operation, and labor disutility in a model of firm dynamics with entry and exit. Shocks to firm operation and labor disutility capture COVID-19 lockdowns. Compared to the productivity shock, the credit and the lockdown...

This paper examines sectoral productivity shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, their aggregate impact, and the possible compensatory effects of improving productivity in infrastructure-related sectors. We employ the KLEMS annual dataset for a group of OECD and Latin America and the Caribbean...

This paper explores the impacts of oil exploitation on human capital accumulation at the local level in Colombia, a resource-rich developing country. We provide evidence based on detailed spatial and temporal data on oil exploitation and education, using the number of wells drilled as an...

The Amazon biome, despite its resilience, is being pushed by unsustainable economic drivers towards an ecological tipping point where restoration to its previous state may no longer possible. This is the result of self-reinforcing interactions between deforestation, climate change and fire. In...

We conduct a randomized controlled trial in Mexico City to determine willingness to pay (WTP) for SMS air quality alerts and to study the effects of air quality alerts, reminders, and a reusable N95 mask on air pollution information and avoidance behavior. At baseline, we elicit WTP for the...

This paper examines the effects of management practices on effective tax rates (ETR) in a sample of medium and large manufacturing firms in Ecuador. We use a novel data set on management practice scores matched with administrative tax data from the Superintendence of Companies and the Internal...

This paper presents an overview of how health outcomes vary across cities in Latin America and discusses some of the known drivers of this variation. There are large disparities in outcomes across cities and across neighborhoods of the same city. Because health is closely related to the...

The literature on ride-hailing has experienced rapid growth in recent years, with an accent on industrialized cities, mainly in the United States and Europe. Previous research has identified the characteristics and preferences of ride-hailing adopters in a handful of cities. However, given their...

This paper discusses the role of sterilized foreign exchange (FX) interventions as a monetary policy instrument for emerging market economies in response to external shocks. We develop a model for a commodity-exporting small open economy in which FX intervention is considered as a balance sheet...