The efficient deployment of green technologies, and more generally, the clean energy transition, will require electricity tariff reforms. Existing tariff schemes often fail to achieve basic economic objectives. They set prices per unit that either exceed or fall short of the social marginal...

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...

The growth of cultural tourism globally has presented an important opportunity for public investment in tourism to drive economic development in developing countries. With Bolivia's regional disparities in income and opportunity, it is critical to understand the regionally differentiated welfare...

This paper evaluates the impacts of a public program that introduced access to part-time childcare centers for children younger than four years of age in poor urban areas in Nicaragua. We explore the effects of this program on several measures of children's and parental outcomes. Our...

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...

Sudden stops in capital flows are a form of financial whiplash that creates instability and crises in the affected economies. Sudden stops in net capital flows trigger current account reversals as countries that were borrowing on net from the rest of the world before the stop can no longer...

This paper documents an inverse U-shape in the evolution of wage inequality in Latin America since 1995, with a sharp reduction starting in 2002. The Gini coefficient of wages increased from 42 to 44 between 1995 and 2002 and declined to 39 by 2015. Between 2002 and 2015, the 90/10 log hourly...

This paper applies an agnostic structural vector autoregression (SVAR) approach to study the response of four Andean economies (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru) to international shocks. More specifically, we look at the response of gross domestic product, the real exchange rate, fiscal and...

To contribute to the debate about the reorganization of the public-school supply, in this paper we analyze a reform introduced in Colombia in 2001 that merged several independent small schools into a single educational institution, with the same name, administration, educational project and...

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...