This study examines the rise and fall in income inequality in Ecuador over the past two decades. Falling income equality during the 2000s partly coincides with the rise to power of a new leftist government, but the trend was already set early in the decade. The recent trend is mainly associated...

Throughout Latin America, conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs play an important role in social policy. These programs aim to influence the accumulation of human capital, as well as reduce poverty. In terms of educational outcomes, a number of impact evaluation studies have shown that such...

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

To raise school attendance, many programs in developing countries eliminate orreduce private contributions to education. This paper documents an unintendednegative effect of such programs. Using data from a randomized experiment thatprovides free uniforms to primary school children in Ecuador,...

This paper studies the effects of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the school environment on educational achievement. To quantify these effects, the impact is evaluated of a project run by the municipality of Guayaquil, Ecuador, which provides computer-aided instruction in...

We estimate the impact of changes in unearned income on the height and weight of young children in a developing country. As source of variation we use changes in the eligibility criteria for receipt of an unconditional cash transfer in Ecuador. Two years after families lost the transfer, which...

Children in developing countries have deep deficits in math and language. Personalized coaching for teachers has been proposed as a way of raising teacher quality and child achievement. We designed a coaching program that focused on one aspect of teacher quality—teacher-child...

Children in developing countries have deep deficits in math and language. Personalized coaching for teachers has been proposed as a way of raising teacher quality and child achievement. We designed a coaching program that focused on one aspect of teacher quality-teacher-child interactions-that...

Conventional economic wisdom has long maintained that there is a necessary trade-off between pursuit of the efficiency of a system and any attempts to improve equity between participants within that system. Economist Robert Lucas demonstrated the implications of this common economic axiom when...

Herkömmlichen Wirtschaftsweisheiten folgend, ging man lange davon aus, dass es unmöglich ist, ein System gleichzeitig effizienter zu gestalten und auf eine größere Gleichheit der Menschen in diesem System hinzuarbeiten. Der Ökonom Robert Lucas beschrieb die Folgen dieses weitverbreiteten...