This working paper advances research on inequality with unique, new data on income distribution in 61 countries, including 20 Latin American countries, to explore the effects of political parties on redistribution. First, consistent with a central, but still contested, assumption of the...

This paper studies the link between severe weather shocks in Colombia and municipality-level incidence of dengue and malaria. The unexpectedly high variability of the 2010 rainfalls relative to previous periods and their regional heterogeneity are exploited as an identification strategy. A...

We identify whether remittances facilitate consumption smoothing during health shocks in Jamaica. In addition, we investigate whether remittances are subject to moral hazard by receivers, how the informal insurance provided by remittances interacts with formal health insurance, and whether there...

Protected areas are a cornerstone of forest conservation in developing countries. Yet we know little about their effects on forest cover change or the socioeconomic status of local communities, and even less about the relationship between these effects. This paper assesses whether 'win-win'...

Estimation of conventional Taylor rules for Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru shows that central banks increase their repo rate in response to increases in the output gap and, except in Peru, to deviations of inflation expectations from target. Using a Markov-Switching methodology, it is found...

This paper analyzes the effects of increased shared computer access in secondary schools in Peru. Administrative data are used to identify, through propensity-score matching, two groups of schools with similar observable educational inputs but different intensity in computer access. Extensive...

There are few reliable estimates of the effects of violence on economic outcomes. This study exploits the manifold increase in homicides in 2008-2011 in Mexico resulting from its war on organized drug traffickers to estimate the effect of drug- related homicides on housing prices. Using an...

This paper presents evidence of the relationship between the disparity in the academic performance of boys and girls in Colombia and the country's excessively high school dropout rates. By using the OLS and trimming for bounds techniques, and based on data derived from the PISA 2009 database,...

Many developing countries are allocating significant resources to expanding technology access in schools. Whether these investments will translate into measurable educational improvements remains an open question because of the limited evidence available. This paper contributes to filling that...

Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and non-cognitive ability appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic...