Using micro data for the urban areas of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, the authors document trends in men's returns to education during the 1980s and the 1990s and estimate the role of supply and demand factors in explaining the changes in skill premia. They propose a model of...

The authors study the effect of pre-primary education on children's subsequent school outcomes by exploiting a unique feature of the Uruguayan household survey (ECH) that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance in the context of a rapid expansion in the supply of pre-primary...

Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and noncognitive abilities appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic...

The authors examine how a government-run cash transfer program targeted to poor mothers in rural Ecuador influenced the health and development of their children. This program is of particular interest because, unlike other transfer programs that have been implemented recently in Latin America,...

Under some conditions, macroeconomic crises can have a positive effect on the accumulation of human capital because they reduce the opportunity cost of schooling. This has profound implications for the design of appropriate social protection policies. The impact of macroeconomic crises on...

A revised version was published as The Allocation and Impact of Social Funds: Spending on School Infrastructure in Peru (with Christina Paxson). World Bank Economic Review 16 (2): 297-319, 2002. - Education projects of the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES) have reached poor districts and, to the...

A revised version was published as The Political Economy of Expenditures by the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES), 1991-95. American Political Science Review 94 (2, June): 289-304, 2000. - As the literature on political influences on the allocation of discretionary funds predicts, spending by the...

Can digital information and communication technology foster mass political mobilization? We use a novel georeferenced data set for the entire African continent between 1998 and 2012 on the coverage of mobile phone signal together with georeferenced data from multiple sources on the occurrence of...

There is limited empirical evidence on whether unrestricted cash social assistance to poor pregnant women improves children’s birth outcomes. Using program administrative micro-data matched to longitudinal vital statistics on the universe of births in Uruguay, we estimate that participation in...