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 examines the causal link between early childhood nutrition and cognition, applying instrumental variables to sibling-differences for a sample of pre-school aged Peruvian children. Child-specific shocks in the form of food price changes and household shocks during the critical...

A growing body of research argues that early adverse experiences have lasting effects not only on later health outcomes, but also on human capital accumulation. This paper investigates the persistent effect of negative shocks early in life on children's health and cognitive outcomes, and...

Development in early childhood predicts schooling and labor market outcomes in adulthood. In this paper we use a fixed effects identification strategy to assess how differences in the quality of child care affect the communication, fine motor, and problem solving skills of infants and toddlers....

El desarrollo en la primera infancia predice lo que serán los resultados en la escolaridad y el mercado laboral en la edad adulta. En este documento usamos una estrategia de identificación de efectos fijos para evaluar el modo en que las diferencias en la calidad de los jardines de cuidado...

This paper uses data from the Global School-based Student Health Survey to investigate the prevalence of health risk behaviors, in particular substance use, risky sexual behavior, and violence among adolescents in 15 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Using logit regressions and...

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...