The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of current practice in microfinance guarantees, highlighting some of the lessons learned to date and issues to be addressed in the future. The paper?s annexes provide a partial inventory of guarantee funds operating in Latin America and the...

This paper argues that welfare programs are linked with the destruction of social capital, as measured by interpersonal trust in laboratory games. The paper employs experimental data for representative samples of individuals in four Latin American capital cities (Bogota, Lima, Montevideo, and...

This paper analyzes the impact of formal property rights on plot use and credit access in 20 communities in Guatemala, and shows how these impacts differ depending on the community conflict context. The paper proposes a new instrument based on detailed information about the geographic location...

Applying the methodology developed in Ñopo (2004), this paper analyzes the evolution of the gender wage gap in Peru from 1986 to 2000. This methodology has two advantages. First, it recognizes that the supports of observable characteristics distributions differ substantially. Second, it...

The paper contains and impact evaluation of matching grants to promote investments in innovation on firm financed R&D and other output variables.

This book presents a new framework for analyzing the political economy of budget processes in Latin America that is based on the following premises: i) the budget process must be considered as part of the overall policymaking process rather than in isolation; ii) budget outcomes cannot be fully...

This paper analyzes whether Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed between the United States and Latin American countries during the last decade produced higher enforcement of labor regulations. The paper computes before-after estimates of the effect of FTAs on labor inspections and exploits...