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...

The conventional paradigm about development banks is that these institutions exist to target well-identified market failures. However, market failures are not directly observable and can only be ascertained with a suitable learning process. Hence, the question is how do the policymakers know...

This paper advances understanding of the relationship between tax policy and productivity, taking advantage of unique data from the Dominican Republic to document a significant negative impact of tax regulations on total factor productivity (TFP). It begins by estimating productivity using...

Low salaries, a limited amount of full-time teaching positions, and alternative systems of allocating teaching hours lead teachers to look for additional jobs in other schools. Although this is a more common phenomenon of teacher labor markets in developing countries, teachers who teach specific...

Due to a lack of reliable data collection systems, traffic fatalities and injuries are often under-reported in developing countries. Recent developments in surrogate road safety methods and video analytics tools offer an alternative approach that can be both lower cost and more time efficient...

Recent years have seen an ever-greater expansion of the digital economy, a development that may bring new opportunities to workers who were at a disadvantage in the traditional economy. We focus on a specific set of workers who belong to such a group: women. We study a skill set of particular...

Despite the renewed interest in technical education, only a handful of studies analyze its effect on academic outcomes. In this paper we apply a regression discontinuity design to oversubscribed technical high school tracks in Pernambuco, Brazil, to identify the impact of technical education...

To contribute to the debate about decentralization of education management, in this paper, we take advantage of the arbitrary rule used in Colombia to define the municipalities that can autonomously manage schools, to evaluate through a Regression Discontinuity methodology the effect of...

This paper analyzes the impact of Mapa- Regalías on efficiency in the execution of public investment projects in Colombia. MapaRegalías is an online platform that displays geo-referenced information and data on royalties coming from the extractives sector. The purpose of the platform is to...

This paper analyzes the impact of MapaRegalías on efficiency in the execution of public investment projects in Colombia. MapaRegalías is an online platform that displays geo-referenced information and data on royalties coming from the extractives sector. The purpose of the platform is to...