Did the North American Free Trade Agreement make Mexican firms more productive? If so, through which channels? This paper addresses these questions by deploying an innovative microeconometric approach that disentangles the various channels through which integration with the global markets (via...

The present study combines data from Mexico's employment surveys (Encuesta Nacional de Empleo and Encuesta Nacional de Ocupacion y Empleo) with the country's official statistics on murder rates to create a state-level panel data set covering the period 1995 to 2013. Including most of the common...

Using all the household survey data available in Latin America during the period 1992 to 2013, this paper estimates that in 2015, 20 million youth ages 15 to 24 years in the region were out of school and not working (making them ninis, for "ni estudian ni trabajan"). The share of out-of-school,...

In 2009, the Mexican state of Colima implemented a low-stakes accountability intervention with diagnostic feedback among 108 public primary schools with the lowest test scores in the national student assessment. A difference-in-difference and a regression discontinuity design are used to...

This paper seeks to understand what drove the trends in learning outcomes in Argentina between 2000 and 2012, using data from four rounds of the Program for International Student Assessment. A year-specific education production function is estimated and its results used to decompose the changes...

The author implements several inequality decomposition methods to measure the extent to which total household income disparities can be attributable to sectoral asymmetries and differences in skill endowments. The results show that at least half of total household inequality in Mexico is...