The paper investigates the effect of remittances on the coverage of financial deficits arising during youth and retirement years and their influence on some household behaviors. To this end, household survey information is used from Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua to perform a number of...

Using a quarterly dataset of 185 listed firms in six Latin American countries between 1993 and 2009 we find that leverage is positively related to tangibility, firm size and the market to book ratio, and negatively related to profitability. The average cost of debt is negatively related with...

This paper provides evidence on the incidence of poverty among the elderly in Latin America and the Caribbean, based on household survey microdata from 20 countries. The situation of older people is characterized in terms of income, employment, education, health and access to services vis-à-vis...

This paper documents patterns and recent developments on different dimensions of inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). New comparative international evidence confirms that LAC is a region of high inequality, although maybe not the highest in the world. Income inequality has fallen...

This paper takes advantage of a new source of information – the Gallup World Poll 2006 – to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC estimates to those in other regions of the world. The Gallup...

This paper provides original empirical evidence on the evolution of education inequality for all Latin American countries over the decades of 1990 and 2000. The analysis covers a wide range of issues on differences in educational outcomes and opportunities across the population, including...

This document presents a systematic review of empirical approaches to the identification and measurement of the middle class as the concept is used in the applied literature. It then presents an arguably less arbitrary definition of the middle class which is based on sound principles of...

This document presents and discusses an extensive set of statistics aimed at characterizing the degree of economic polarisation in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. The study is based on a dataset of household surveys from 21 LAC countries in the period 1989-2004. Latin America...

This paper provides evidence on growth and income poverty in Latin American and the Caribbean. Results are obtained by processing microdata from household surveys of 18 LAC countries covering the 1990s and early 2000s. Over this period the LAC economies have experienced very heterogeneous...