This paper evaluates the effectiveness of easing credit constraints for rural producers in Mexico through loans provided by a national public development finance institution. In contrast to most of the existing literature, the study focuses on the effect of medium-sized loans over a two- to...

We assess the consequences for consumers in 76 countries of multinational acquisitions in beer and spirits. Outcomes depend on how changes in ownership affect markups versus efficiency. We find that owner fixed effects contribute very little to the performance of brands. On average, foreign...

This study analyzes mobility patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic for eight large Latin American cities. Indicators of mobility by socioeconomic status (SES) are generated by combining georeferenced mobile phone information with granular census data. Before the pandemic, a strong positive...

This paper studies the effect of capital controls on misallocation and welfare in an economy with financial constraints. We build a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms, financial constraints and international trade and calibrate it to the Chilean economy. Since high-productivity...

This paper uses data on policy measures affecting services operation and trade to document and estimate the impact of different types of policy measures on services exports and imports, with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. It finds that market-entry measures are important to both...

Coral reefs are one of the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth. The Mesoamerican Reef contains the largest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere. However, its health is threatened, so there is a need for a management and sustainable conservation. Key to this is knowing the economic...

This paper uses a model of intergenerational accounting to simulate the intergenerational distribution of oil wealth in Venezuela. Venezuelan oil production does not seem to follow an optimal extraction path. Nevertheless, this is true if we do not consider what the government does with the...

This paper examines new data on public sector employees from 18 Latin American countries to shed light on the role of trust in the performance of government agencies. We developed an original survey taken during the first COVID-19 wave that includes randomized experiments with pandemic-related...

We conducted an experiment in low-income schools in Chile to test the effects and behavioral changes triggered by a program that sends attendance, grade, and classroom behavior information to parents via weekly and monthly text messages. Our 18-month intervention raised average math GPA by 0.09...

This study examines the gendered effects of early and sustained exposure to high-performing peers on female educational trajectories. Exploiting random allocation to classrooms within middle schools, we measure the effect of male and female high performers on girls' high school placement...