This paper analyzes the causes of corruption in contemporary Bolivia. It argues that, along with the well-documented observation that richer countries tend, on average, to be less corrupt than poorer ones, corruption is directly dependent on FDI inflows, with higher levels of FDI associated with...

Empirical evidence indicates that in Latin America and the Caribbean, households on less favored, or marginal, agricultural land form a "residual" pool of rural labor. Although the modern sector may be the source of dynamic growth through learning-by-doing and knowledge spillovers, patterns of...

The manufacturing sectors in Latin America have been more affected by the currency over/undervaluation than their counterpart in industrialized economies. From a panel data set covering 39 countries and 22 manufacturing sectors (2-digit) within 1995-2008, we formally test the hypothesis that...

How much fiscal space do Latin American countries have to increase their tax burdens in the long term? This paper provides an answer through Laffer curves estimates for taxes on labor, capital, and consumption for the six largest emerging economies of the region: Argentina, Brazil, Chile,...

This paper aims to shed additional light on the existence of opportunistic and partisan political-business cycles in the Brazilian economy over the 1996-2016 period. To that end, it relies on two different approaches: (I) an Oaxaca model in the spirit of Blinder and Watson (2016); and (II) a...

We provide empirical evidence supporting a causal link between education and risk attitudes when using representative data from representative surveys and artefactual or lab-on-the-field experiments in Lima, Peru. We employ three standard experimental measures of risk attitudes and find that...

Using firm-level data for five countries in Latin America we find a negative and statistically significant link between social conflict in rural areas and ownership of mines. This result suggests that the social conflict around mining projects can affect strategic firm behavior intended to...

The paper investigates the determinants of household energy spending and energy budget shares, with a focus on understanding their non-linear relationship with income, and the presence of economies of scale. The analysis is based on a unique, harmonized collection of official household surveys...

For a selected group of Latin America countries we estimated the parameters of convergence equations on the basis of annual data. We test cross-country heterogeneity of parameters within a system of Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equations (SURE) that departures from standard approach utilizing...

This document offers estimates of the possible changes in the social structure of the countries of Latin America derived from the consequent economic contraction from the Covid-19 pandemic and explores the possible costs and benefits of different types of interventions to cushion its impact. The...