Do voters punish governments that introduce fiscal "austerity" measures? If so, does voter response vary according to the design (composition) of fiscal adjustments? What determines the timing of fiscal consolidations? The empirical literature on the political economy of fiscal adjustments,...

This paper explores for the first time the impact of a demand-driven training program on labor turnover at both firm and worker level. Launched in 2014 by the Ministry of Development, Industry and Trade (MDIC in Portuguese), Pronatec-MDIC allows firms to demand courses which some of their...

Forecasts about the effect of new technologies on labor demand are generally pessimistic. However, little is known about the current level of adoption and the effect on labor demand, particularly in developing countries. This paper exploits a recent employer survey in Peru to offer empirical...

Many countries in the Caribbean have been grappling with persistent fiscal imbalances and rising debt levels. The average debt to GDP ratio in the Caribbean in 2017 was 76.6 percent, higher than the negative debt-growth threshold of 60 percent of GDP. Also, the average fiscal deficit as a...

Understanding the causal association between skills and productivity is essential for designing effective training programs. This paper evaluates an intervention aimed at boosting leadership and communication skills among store managers and sales associates from a large Latin American retailer....

The efficient deployment of green technologies, and more generally, the clean energy transition, will require electricity tariff reforms. Existing tariff schemes often fail to achieve basic economic objectives. They set prices per unit that either exceed or fall short of the social marginal...

This study looks at the performance of livestock production in Uruguay and Paraguay, analyzing two situations with different implications for development: the displacement of livestock by soybean production as occurred in Uruguay and in the Eastern region of Paraguay, and the expansion of the...

The growth of cultural tourism globally has presented an important opportunity for public investment in tourism to drive economic development in developing countries. With Bolivia's regional disparities in income and opportunity, it is critical to understand the regionally differentiated welfare...

This paper evaluates the impacts of a public program that introduced access to part-time childcare centers for children younger than four years of age in poor urban areas in Nicaragua. We explore the effects of this program on several measures of children's and parental outcomes. Our...

This paper revisits the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth by addressing the endogeneity issue stemming from reverse causality and unobserved factors that has plagued previous extensive literature on this subject. In our approach, we use the Geographic Fragmentation...