Punitive anti-crime policies in the Americas have contributed to steadily increasing rates of incarceration. This creates prison overcrowding and can lead to recidivism. Harsh penalties are often demanded by citizens, making them politically attractive for politicians. Yet the contextual...

International trade has been stated as one of the most important mean of improving firms' productivity, being the channel behind, the technology transfer from foreign companies to local firms. Focusing on imports, they can positively contribute to local firm's productivity performance by...

International trade is subject to information incompleteness. Firms must therefore engage in a costly search process to find business partners. Online platforms can reduce these search costs and thereby favor firms exports. We examine whether this is actually the case and the underlying...

Sudden stops in net capital flows can be prevented if domestic investors either repatriate foreign-held assets or roll over their local asset holdings when foreign investors stop lending or sell off their local asset holdings. This paper presents evidence showing that domestic factors such as...

Theory suggests both resilience and fragility in banking networks. This paper finds both, exploiting a new database of cross-border syndicated lending to developing countries from 1993 to 2017. Shocks propagate via co-lenders driven by central players, but shocks impacting fringe banks have...

We study the effects of female immigration on the labor supply of Dominican-born women of different educational levels and family structures. Using individual-level data for 2003 - 2016 and exploiting geographic variation in early immigrant settlements together with time variation in female...

New technological trends, such as digitization, artificial intelligence and robotics, have the power to drastically increase economic output but may also displace workers. In this paper we assess the risk of automation for female and male workers in four Latin American countries Bolivia, Chile,...

We present new evidence that a non-threatening behavioral intervention appealing to reciprocity significantly increases tax compliance in a setting (i.e., crisis-ridden Argentina) where one might least expect such an intervention to succeed. Prior research offers many examples of the efficacy of...

This paper assesses debt sustainability in Guatemala. Debt stability has been achieved at very low expenditure levels, at the expense of adequate provisioning of public goods and services and a widening gap in social development and infrastructure. Since fiscal outcomes are not independent from...

This paper uses the sudden surge in Chinese competition faced by Brazil's manufacturers in the 2000s to revisit the findings from the literature on how productivity, innovation, and employment were impacted by the Great Liberalizationa period of massive trade opening in the early 1990s in Latin...