The authors bring new empirical evidence on the impact of the choice of ownership and regulatory regime on firms'productivity and prices paid by consumers. They collect the evidence from a sample of electricity distribution companies in Latin America. The authors rely on estimations of labor and...

We analyze the impact of alternative regulatory regimes on the labor productivity of electricity distribution firms in Latin America. We find that (i) incentive-based regimes lead to higher labor productivity than rate-of-return regulation, and (ii) privatized firms operating under rate of...

A decade of experience has shown that monitoring the performance of public and private monopolies is the hardest part of electricity sector reform in South America-because operators control most of the information needed for effective regulation. South American electricity regulators can reduce...

Most discussion of after-school programs in shantytowns has centered on estimating mean impacts of programs, and results are not conclusive. Previous literature provides some explanations for these mixed results but this paper provides a new channel: the effectiveness of an after-school program...

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...

The main finding of this impact evaluation is that beneficiary firms of FONTAR as a whole and of ANR in particular, spend more on innovation activities such as research and development and purchase of technology. Increments in innovation expenditures are found even when the amount received by...

The main contributions of this paper are the development of a new test of the stock market hypothesis and a new application of the tests for return predictability to the Buenos Aires Stock Market. In the first part, a survey of these tests is made, including, among others, the variance bound...