Over the last two decades, Mexico has experienced macroeconomic stability, an open trade regime, and substantial progress in education. Yet average workers' earnings have stagnated, and earnings of those with higher schooling have fallen, compressing the earnings distribution and lowering the...

Scholars have often argued that crime hinders growth, but the empirical literature assessing such an effect is scarce. By exploiting cross-municipal income and crime data for Mexico, in this study we find evidence indicating that drug-related crime indeed deters growth.

This document presents a systematic review of empirical approaches to the identification and measurement of the middle class as the concept is used in the applied literature. It then presents an arguably less arbitrary definition of the middle class which is based on sound principles of...

This study investigates the impact of recent crises in Argentina (including the severe downturn of 2001–02) on health and education outcomes. The identification strategy relies on both the inter-temporal and the cross-provincial co-variation between changes in regional GDP and outcomes by...

Identifying relevant variables for multidimensional poverty analysis depends on how different dimensions complement or substitute each other, given the existence of attributes highly correlated with household income. Dimensions weakly correlated with household income highlight the relevance of...

Evidence of a causal effect of inequality on crime is scarce in developing countries. This paper estimates the effect in a unique context: Mexico's Drug War. The analysis exploits a unique dataset containing inequality and crime statistics for more than 2,000 Mexican municipalities over a...

Social policy in Mexico has focused on identifying and supporting households in extreme poverty. Yet, the country has a significant number of households just above the poverty line who are not eligible, by definition, for antipoverty programs and are at risk of falling into poverty in the event...

Poverty maps are a useful tool for targeting social programs on areas with high concentrations of poverty. However, a static focus on poverty ignores its temporal dimension. Thus, current nonpoor households still face substantial welfare volatility and are at risk of becoming poor in the face of...

This paper analyzes the effect of compulsory schooling on the incidence of child labor, within a dynamic, overlapping-generations, general equilibrium setting. Parents in this model are altruistic. Both human and physical capital is accumulated and parents care about their own consumption and...