The initiation in criminal activities is, typically, a young phenomenon. The study of the determinants of entry into criminal activities should pay attention to major events affecting youth. In many countries, one of these important events is mandatory participation in military service. The...

Using panel data for Peru for 1994-2000, the authors find that when households receive two, or more services jointly, the welfare increases as measured by changes in consumption are larger than when services are provided separately. The increases appear to be more than proportional, as F-tests...

There is growing interest in using messaging to drive prosocial behaviors, which contribute to investment in public goods. The authors worked with a leading nongovernmental organization in Peru to randomize nine different prorecycling messages that were crafted on the basis of best practices,...

The authors examine the empirical links between current account deficits and a broad set of economic variables proposed in the literature. To accomplish this, they complement and extend previous research by using a large, consistent set of macroeconomic data on public and private domestic...

Some critics of privatization argue that poor labor force restructuring is a key concern and that governments should establish better retrenchment programs. Using new data from a sample of 400 companies in the world, Chong and López-de-Silanes test competing theories about the wisdom of...

This paper takes advantage of repeated cross-section household surveys and a sharp discontinuity created by the introduction of an unconditional cash transfer to elders. The paper evaluates the impact of these cash transfers on the educational expenditures for children within a household. The...

The main reason Lima failed to implement a concession was geographical: the scarcity of water sources meant high marginal costs, partly for pumping water from deep wells and building adequate storage for dry periods. High extraction costs were compounded by years of neglect; much of the system...

This paper presents an evaluation of multiple variants of a commonly used intervention to boost education in developing countries - the conditional cash transfer - with a student level randomization that allows the authors to generate intra-family and peer-network variation. The analysis tests...

In 1999 the city of Bogota, Colombia launched the concession school program designed to broaden the coverage and quality of basic education. It consists of a contract between a group of private schools and the public educational system such that private agents provide education for low-income...

This paper evaluates a primary school scholarship program in Cambodia with two different targeting mechanisms, one based on poverty level and the other on baseline test scores ("merit"). Both targeting mechanisms increased enrollment and attendance. However, only the merit-based targeting...