Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and non-cognitive ability 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...

Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and non-cognitive ability 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...

In the last decades, countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have experienced a dramatic increase in the levels of higher education enrollment. Using administrative data from Chile and Colombia, we find that this phenomenon is not always associated with higher private individual returns. In...

This paper studies the effect of mandated employer-provided child care on the wages of women hired in large firms in Chile. We use a unique employer-employee database from the country's unemployment insurance (UI) system containing monthly information for all individuals that started a new...

Labor market institutions shape the return to workers' skills. They define the incentives of firms and workers to invest in general and specific skills, affecting the returns to experience and tenure. This paper presents an empirical assessment of this hypothesis. We take advantage of rich...

This paper presents a comprehensive empirical analysis of the impact of attending a child day care center on early childhood development (ECD) in Chile, examining child development from a multi-dimensional perspective. The potential endogeneity associated with the parental decision of sending...

Understanding the causal association between skills and productivity is essential for designing effective training programs. This paper evaluates an intervention aimed at boosting leadership and communication skills among store managers and sales associates from a large Latin American retailer....

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...