Asignaciones Familiares is a child allowances program that was incepted in Uruguay in 1942 and significantly modified in 2008. The program is focused on children aged 0 to 18 and aims at alleviating poverty and promoting school attendance particularly among teen-agers. This paper presents an...

In a typical developing country, coverage of the contributory social security system is low. We analyze the aggregate effects of a revenue-neutral fiscal-cum-social policy reform that consists of: 1) the implementation of universal social insurance to replace the system with low coverage; and 2)...

This paper provides evidence on peer effects in standardized tests by exploiting a unique data set on social networks in Uruguayan primary schools. The identification method enables one to disentangle endogenous from contextual effects via instrumental variables that emerge naturally from the...