This paper presents results from a randomized controlled trial whereby approximately 1,000 OLPC XO laptops were provided for home use to children attending primary schools in Lima, Peru. The intervention increased access and use of home computers, with some substitution away from computer use...

Social networks provide an important means by which individuals and households share risk. One of the mechanisms by which informal risk sharing could be achieved is through remittances. Accordingly, this paper identifies whether and how remittances facilitate consumption smoothing during health...

Thinly traded securities exist in both emerging and well developed markets. However, plausible estimations of market risk measures for portfolios with infrequently traded securities have not been explored in the literature. We propose a methodology to calculate market risk measures based on the...

In today’s knowledge-based societies, understanding basic scientific concepts and the capacity to structure and solve scientific questions is more critical than ever. Accordingly, in this paper we test an innovative methodology for teaching science and environment in public primary schools...

We estimate the impact of access to information and communication technologies on agricultural profitability and child labor among isolated villages in rural Peru. We exploit an intervention that provided at least one public (satellite) payphone to 6,509 rural villages that did not previously...

This paper provides evidence on the effects of access to telecommunications technologies on agricultural profitability and human capital investment decisions among highly isolated villages in rural Peru. I exploit a quasi-natural experiment, in which the Peruvian government through the Fund for...

In today's knowledge-based societies, understanding basic scientific concepts and the capacity to structure and solve scientific questions is more critical than ever. Accordingly, in this article we test an innovative methodology for teaching science and environment in public primary schools...

We estimate the effects of mobile phone coverage on different measures of economic development. We exploit the timing of mobile coverage at the village level merging it with a village-level panel dataset for rural Peru. The main findings suggest that mobile phone expansion has increased...

This paper assesses labor market segmentation across formal and informal salaried jobs and self-employment in three Latin American and three transition countries. It looks separately at the markets for skilled and unskilled labor, inquiring if segmentation is an exclusive feature of the latter....

En este trabajo se analiza la segmentación del mercado laboral entre empleos asalariados formales e informales y el empleo independiente en tres países latinoamericanos y tres países en transición. Se analizan por separado los mercados de mano de obra calificada y no calificada, se averigua...