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...

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 analyzes extractive industries in Colombia and their connections to other economic activities in the country. We use detailed social security data on all formal employees to create an industry-relatedness measure using labor flows between industries. Drawing on the vast network...

The current coronavirus pandemic is an unprecedented public health challenge that has devastating economic impacts for households. Using a sample of 230,540 respondents to online surveys in 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, we show that the economic impacts are large and unequal:...

The objective of this report is to examine the extent to which countries in Latin America and the Caribbean participate in global value chains and what are the drivers of such participation. Production processes have been increasingly fragmented worldwide. For example, the production of the...