There is scant empirical economic research regarding the way that Latin American governments efficiently allocate their spending across different functions to achieve higher growth. While most papers restrict their analysis to the size of government, much less is known about the composition of...

We conducted a paired correspondence experiment in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to measure the extent of labor market discrimination in hiring against slum dwellers. We sent 4,290 online pairs of fictitious job applications of otherwise observationally equivalent individuals who differed in a single...

A renewed interest in explaining growth in the Caribbean countries is motivated by the somewhat slow but uneven performance in the past decade: per capita GDP gaps in Caribbean countries have widened in relation to the United States, whereas standard theories would predict convergence. This...

Although knowledge spillovers are at the core of the innovation policy’s justification, they have never been properly measured by any impact evaluation. This paper fills this gap by estimating the spillover effects of the FONTAR program in Argentina. We use an employer-employee matched panel...

This study discusses four cases of public-private collaboration (PPC) in the design and implementation of productive development policies (PDP) in Argentina. We find that PPCs have contributed to the success of most of the studied PDPs by facilitating information sharing and creating...

This paper estimates the impact of two productive development programs (PDPs) in Costa Rica: PROPYME and CR Provee. The first seeks to increase the capacity of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) to innovate, and the second aims to increase backward linkages between Costa Rican SMEs and...

While effective industrial policy requires close cooperation between government and business, there is little agreement on what makes that cooperation work best. This paper analyzes institutional arrangements for public-private cooperation and the character of private sector representation....

This paper uses a yearly dataset of plant-level investment in Colombian firms during the period 1997 to 2007 to assess the impact of a tax incentive for firms that invest in fixed assets implemented in 2004. A positive and statistically significant correlation is found between the boom observed...

This paper surveys gender wage gaps in Colombia from 1994 to 2006, using matching comparisons to examine the extent to which individuals with similar human capital characteristics earn different wages. Three sub-periods are considered: 1994-1998; 2000- 2001; and 2002- 2006. The gaps dropped from the...