This research examines the effect of accountability threats for low performing schools on resource allocation decisions and provides evidence that schools act with strategic behavior only when the accountability pressure is high. We used a generalization of a traditional regression discontinuity...

This paper explores rank-ordered teacher candidates' preferences for public schools in Peru by analyzing the 2015 teacher hiring process. Our analysis shows that, in seeking permanent positions in public schools, candidates appear to search closer to where they attended their Teacher Education...

This paper studies the effect of ambient light on crime, taking advantage of the daylight saving time (DST) policy, which imposes exogenous variations in daylight exposure at specific hours of the day. The paper uses a rich administrative database managed by Chile's national police, a...

Citizens confront multiple challenges when attempting to access public services. This article focuses on an aspect yet unaddressed by existing literature on administrative burdens: the complexity of the written language used by government agencies in Latin America. It presents an impact...

This paper examines individual-level support for trade liberalization, relates it to beliefs about trade, and measures its sensitivity to positive and negative framing. The data come from the 2018 Latinobarometro survey of eighteen countries, in which the authors embedded a survey experiment to...

Brazil has had a long period of high inflation. It peaked around 100 percent per year in 1964, decreased until the first oil shock (1973), but accelerated again afterward, reaching levels above 100 percent on average between 1980 and 1994. This last period coincided with severe balance of...

Conditional cash transfer programs have become a popular social protection tool in developing countries. They aim to reduce short-term poverty through cash transfers and long-term poverty through enhancing investments in human capital. While numerous evaluations of CCTs show positive short-term...

Carbon taxes are advocated as efficient fiscal and environmental policies, but they have proven difficult to implement. One reason is that carbon taxes can aggravate poverty by increasing prices of basic goods and services such as food, heating, and commuting. Meanwhile, cash transfer programs...

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...

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...