Inequality in Latin America fell substantially in the early 2000s. In this paper, we take advantage of administrative matched employee-employed data in Brazil, Chile and Ecuador to examine whether these inequality trends held in the formal sector, as well. We document a significant decrease in...

Bullying cannot be tolerated as a normal social behavior portraying a child's life. This paper quantifies its negative consequences allowing for the possibility that victims and nonvictims differ in unobservable characteristics. To this end, we introduce a factor analytic model for identifying...

This paper explores the contribution of teachers to student performance in Chile's college admission test (PSU). Our analysis is based on a unique teacher-student matched dataset and decomposition methods. The findings suggest that teachers' performance on the PSU and the characteristics of...

Analysis of two water subsidy schemes a means tested subsidy in Chile and a geographically targeted subsidy in Colombia shows that the means-tested system is better able to identify poor households than the geographically targeted scheme. However, the overall distributive impact of both schemes...

Analysis of two water subsidy schemes--a means-tested subsidy in Chile and a geographically targeted subsidy in Colombia--shows that the means-tested system is better able to identify poor households than the geographically targeted scheme. However, the overall distributive impact of both...

This article examines how a policy oriented toward a specific group within the population can have collateral effects on the economic decisions of other groups. In 1996, the Chilean government approved the extension of the school day from half- to full-day school. This article exploits the...