Levels of development vary widely within countries in the Americas. We argue that part of this variation has its roots in the colonial era, when colonizers engaged in different economic activities in different regions of a country. We present evidence consistent with the view that “bad”...

In this article, we revisit the relationship among institutions, human capital, and development. We argue that empirical models that treat institutions and human capital as exogenous are misspecified, both because of the usual omitted variable bias problems and because of differential...

While the aggregate effects of sudden stops and international financial crises are well known, the disaggregated channels through which they work are not well explored yet. In this paper, using job flows from a sectoral panel dataset for four Latin American countries, we find that sudden stops...

Why does schooling attainment vary widely across countries? Why are differences in schooling attainment highly persistent? I show that cross-country differences in schooling are related to political institutions, such as democracy and local democracy (political decentralization), which are...

This paper provides empirical evidence on some of the microeconomic effects of the capital controls introduced in Chile during the 1990s, in particular, the unremunerated reserve requirement (URR). By looking at financial statements for a group of 73 Chilean firms during 1986-2001, the paper...

This paper studies the implications of school choice in the context of the Chilean quasivoucher system. We use information of school choices of about 80,000 students that lived in the Metropolitan Area of Santiago in Chile in 2002 and the results of the discrete choice model estimated in Gallego...

Using regional data for about 180 African provinces, we find that measures of Protestant missionary activity in the past are more correlated with schooling variables today than similar measures of Catholic missionary activity, as previous papers have suggested. However, we find that this effect...

This paper discusses the importance of incorporating personal assistance into interventions aimed at improving long-term education and labor market success. While existing research demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of low-touch behavioral nudges, this paper argues that the dynamic nature of...