Is there any relation between education and democracy? Once we correct for weak instruments and identify education as "weakly exogenous" we find new evidence that education systematically predicts democracy. Our results are robust across model specification, instrumentation strategies, and samples.

This paper considers a conditional cash transfer program targeting poor households in small rural villages and studies the effects of the geographic proximity between villages on individual enrollment decisions. Exploiting variations in the treatment status across contiguous villages generated...

In policy circles a lively debate exists regarding the effects on educational outcomes of introducing computers in schools. A number of empirical studies have measured its effect on test scores. There is a lack of empirical evidence, however, on the effects of this type of intervention on...

This paper analyzes the political economy of productivity-related policymaking in Chile following a political transaction cost model (Spiller and Tommasi, 2003; Murillo et al., 2008). The main findings indicate that i) the Chilean policymaking process (PMP) was successful in the 1990s in...

This paper reviews evidence on social mobility in Latin America. Several studies have used data sets that collect intergenerational socio economic information. The data, though limited, suggest that social mobility is low in the region, even when compared with low social mobility developed...

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...

The recent financial crisis has initiated pressures for not only policy reform but also fundamental institutional fiscal reforms. This paper explores the connection between economic crises and fiscal institutional reforms in a region that has experienced plenty of both in recent years, namely...

This paper examines the causal link between education and democracy. Motivated by a model whereby educated individuals are in a better position to assess the effects of public policies and hence favor democracy where their opinions matter, the empirical analysis uses World Values Surveys to...

This document surveys Bank lending operations designed to fight poverty and enhance social equity, with emphasis on recently approved projects with innovative components. It also surveys a broad range of poverty-related non-lending activities carried out by the Bank over the past two years. It...

The purpose of this report is to investigate the effects of family background factors in determining the intergenerational transmission of poverty in Latin America, drawing on a review of recent studies and empirical work done for this study. Based on the findings of this investigation, the...