Paxson and Schady examine the relationship between early cognitive development, socioeconomic status, child health, and parenting quality in a developing country. They use a sample of over 3,000 predominantly poor pre-school age children from Ecuador and analyze determinants of their scores on...

The authors study the impact of the 1988-94 trade liberalization in Brazil on wage distribution. They explore three main channels through which trade liberalization could have affected wage distribution: (1) increasing returns to skilled workers because of Hecksher-Ohlin adjustments to trade...

Since its creation in 1991, the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES) has spent about US$570 million funding micro-projects throughout Peru. Many of these projects have involved building and renovating school facilities. The authors analyze the targeting and impact of FONCODES investments in the...

Do aggregate economic shocks, such as those caused by macroeconomic crises or droughts, reduce child human capital? The answer to this question has important implications for public policy. If shocks reduce investments in children, they may transmit poverty from onegeneration to the next. This...

Changes in the relative wages of workers with different amounts of education have profound implications for developing countries, where initial levels of inequality are often very high. In this paper we use micro data for five Latin American countries over the 1980s and 1990s to document trends...

How important are subsistence concerns in a family's decision to send a child to work? We consider this question in Ecuador, where poor families are selected at random to receive a cash transfer that is equivalent to 7 percent of monthly expenditures. Winning the cash transfer lottery is...

A variety of theories of skill formation suggest that investments in schooling and other dimensions of human capital will have lower returns if children do not have adequate levels of cognitive and social skills at an early age. This paper analyzes the impact of a randomized cash transfer...

Industry affiliation provides an important channel through which trade liberalization can affect worker earnings and wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers. This empirical study of the impact of the 1988--94 trade liberalization in Brazil on the industry wage structure suggests...

The effect of macroeconomic crises on child health is a topic of great policy importance. We use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to analyze the impact of a profound crisis in Peru on infant mortality. We show that there was an increase in the infant mortality rate of about 2.5...

The effect of macroeconomic crises on child health is a topic of great policy importance. This article analyzes the impact of a profound crisis in Peru on infant mortality. It finds an increase of about 2.5 percentage points in the infant mortality rate for children born during the crisis of the...