Teachers are the most fundamental input of students' learning. For this reason, developing teaching skills is a policy priority for most governments around the world. We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of "Let's All Learn to Read," a one-year professional development program that...

Using administrative data from the urban Mexican Oportunidades program, this paper analyzes why poor households choose less education for their children, even when offered financial compensation for school attendance. Each school year, half of recipients forgo income for which they are eligible...

This paper studies whether household surveys precisely identify the LGBT population and are suitable to measure labor market discrimination in Colombia. We first quantify the size of the LGBT population and estimate labor market inequalities from these data, highlighting potential pitfalls from...

This paper estimates the effect of childcare availability on parents' employment probability using the timing of death of grandmothers-the primary childcare providers in Mexico-as identifying variation. I use a triple-difference to disentangle the effect of coinhabiting grandmothers' deaths due...

Understanding health-seeking behaviors and their drivers is key for governments to manage health policies. There is a growing literature on the role of cognitive biases and heuristics in health and care-seeking behaviors, but little is known of how they might be influenced during a context of...

This paper compares the saving behavior of formal and informal workers and additionally provides a socioeconomic and financial characterization of informal workers in Chile. The paper uses the Financial Household Survey conducted by the Central Bank of Chile in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, which...

Accurate demographic data are essential for effective policy design, yet private costs may deter individuals from truthfully reporting sensitive information. We examine this market failure and its implications in the context of child motherhood. Using administrative records from Brazil, Mexico,...

This paper investigates informal employment in Brazil's highly regulated labor market, focusing on the intensive margin of informality within formal firms. Using a comprehensive dataset of labor audits conducted from 1997 to 2012, we find that formal firms caught with informal workers face...

Using establishment-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, we assess the market power of exporting firms across 16 countries in Latin America. Leveraging information on export destinations, as well as exchange rate and price data, we construct exchange rate-driven shocks to the...

This paper considers a conditional cash transfer program targeting poor households in small rural villages and studies the effects of the geographic proximity between villages on individual enrollment decisions. Exploiting variations in the treatment status across contiguous villages generated...