Personal income taxation remains relatively low in many developing countries despite recent democratic advancement and rapid economic growth; this is hard to reconcile with standard political economy models of taxation. This paper argues that the details of political institutions help to explain...

This paper examines early childhood development (ECD) outcomes and their association with family characteristics, investments, and environmental factors, with particular emphasis on the inter-generational transmission of cognitive abilities. The paper examines the causal relationship between...

This paper examines the efficacy of three conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua in mitigating the potential negative effects of an income shock caused by falling prices of coffee, an important cash crop to many CCT participants. A theoretical household model...

Government intervention in the construction sector as a way to boost the economy has been a constant in Colombia for the past 90 years. This paper explicitly tests the impact of the most recent of such interventions: a subsidy to the mortgage interest rate. The results show that the subsidy...

The presidential politics literature depicts presidents either as all-powerful actors or figureheads and seeks to explain outcomes accordingly. The president and the executive branch are nonetheless usually treated as black boxes, particularly in developing countries, even though the presidency...

This paper compares the dynamic consistency of targeting methodologies that use multidimensional welfare indicators with those based on means and proxy means tests using panel data from Mexico. To make these comparisons, an extension of the Alkire and Foster (2008) dual cutoff multidimensional...

This paper attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of Bolivia's labor market institutions, particularly the Plan Nacional de Empleo de Emergencia (PLANE). It is found that unemployment as conventionally defined may not be the most important problem in Bolivia's labor market, as the non-salaried...

This paper analyzes quantitative findings on the innovative behavior of firms in the production chains of pisco and shoe manufacture in Peru, which are served by the network of Technological Innovation Centers (CITEs), the most important technology policy instrument available in Peru. These two...

This is the first study that uniformly analyzes health perceptions in all of Latin America and tests in a systematic way their relation to economic conditions at the country, income group and individual levels. The study uses three types of health self-assessment questions: i) health...