This paper is a comparison between two programs implemented to combat poverty in Latin America: Prospera (Prosper) in Mexico and Asignación Universal por Hijo (Universal Assignment for Child) in Argentina. The first section offers a review of the emergence of the welfare state, examining...

Green fiscal reforms would contribute to climate change mitigation, increase the economic efficiency of national tax systems and provide additional public revenues. Some countries in Latin America have already taken first steps towards green fiscal reforms. This outlook article provides an...

This working paper presents an up-to-date and prospective assessment of water security throughout the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, with a focus on infrastructure needs, to aid in strategic thinking towards planning and management in key water-using sectors such as agriculture,...

Simplified tax regimes reduce both tax rates and compliance costs for small firms. On the one hand, these regimes increase the number of businesses formally registered and have the potential of also expanding the safety net when they subsidize the contributions to social security of workers in...

This paper examines the relationship between public financial management (PFM), the financing of health interventions, and health outcomes. Specifically, the paper econometrically tests whether the effect of PFM on under-five (U5) mortality depends on the relevance of public sector health...

In the last decade, several Latin American governments have implemented new teacher recruitment policies based on evaluations of candidates' competency and knowledge so as to raise the quality of their teachers and schools. Since 2007, the Ecuadorian government has required teacher candidates to...

Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and non-cognitive ability appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic...

Extreme weather induced by climate change can have major consequences for human health. In this study, I quantify the effect of tropical storm frequency and severity on mortality using objective meteorological data and the universe of vital statistics records from a large developing country,...

During electoral campaigns in new democracies, parties and candidates often employ clientelist strategies such as vote buying to mobilize electoral support. The academic consensus is that when voters are offered gifts or money in exchange for their votes, it has detrimental consequences for...

This paper examines individual-level support for trade liberalization, relates it to beliefs about trade, and measures its sensitivity to positive and negative framing. The data come from the 2018 Latinobarometro survey of eighteen countries, in which the authors embedded a survey experiment to...

This paper analyzes the efficient labor supply of male and female workers in Latin American countries employing the collective model framework (Chiappori et al.,2002). Using data from Time Use Surveys for Mexico (2009) and Colombia (2012), we find evidence of Pareto-efficient labor supply...

This paper contributes to the methodological literature on the estimation of international poverty lines for Latin America based on the official poverty lines chosen by the Latin American governments and commonly used in the public debate. The paper exploits a comprehensive data set of 86...

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This edited volume examines how economic processes have worked upon social lives and social realities in Latin America during the past decades. Through tracing the effects of the neoliberal epoch into the era of the so-called pink tide, the...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of nonfinancial corporate debt in six large Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru), distinguishing between bond-issuing and non-bond-issuing firms, and assessing the debt's macroeconomic implications. The paper...

This paper studies the theoretical effects of changes in disaster risk on macroeconomic variables in five Latin American economies. It compares country-specific variants of the New Keynesian model with disaster risk developed by Isoré and Szczerbowicz (2017). Countries with higher price...

This paper contributes to the teacher sorting literature by analyzing equity in the distribution of teachers in three educational systems in Latin America, with different equalization policies, teacher assignment rules, and incentives to work in disadvantaged schools: Chile, Colombia, and Peru....

While Latin America has historically been considered a region of very high inequality, the performance of most Latin American countries in terms of reduction of income inequality has been remarkable good in the first decade of this century. Given that those improvements took place in a context...

This paper discusses the transportation challenges that urban areas in Latin America and the Caribbean face and reviews the causal evidence on the impact brought by different urban transport system interventions implemented around the world. The objective is to highlight the main lessons learned...

Energy subsidies have been criticized due to their economic inefficiency and promotion of wasteful usage of energy and associated carbon emissions. Conversely, environmental taxes are advocated as efficient policy instruments. Nonetheless, removing subsidies and taxing energy can be politically...

I develop the implications for real exchange rate cycles of different policy preferences, focusing in particular on broadly stylized features of major Latin American and East Asian economies. Recent political science literature has emphasized the role of factors such as the influence of the...

In this paper we analyze the role of economic growth in the recent deceleration of female labor force participation (LFP) in Latin America. We study the relationship between the business cycle and female LFP by estimating fixed effects models, using data from harmonized national household...

The link between innovation and employment is at the center of the policy debate. This paper sheds light on how labor market regulations affect the relationship between different types of innovation and employment in Latin America. We estimate the model developed by Harrison et al. (2014) using...

Labor market institutions shape the return to workers’ skills. They define the incentives of firms and workers to invest in general and specific skills, affecting the returns to experience and tenure. This paper presents an empirical assessment of this hypothesis. We take advantage of rich...

Latin American market-oriented reforms along the lines of the Washington Consensus need to be supplemented by a number of social policies to achieve a more equitable society. While there has been considerable progress in enhancing the efficiency, much less has been made with regard to improving...

Economists have had much to say about the impact of economic policies on growth, but little on their distributional consequences and poverty impact. The reorientation of development policy from structural adjustment to poverty reduction as the central objective thus called for new tools to...

The causes and consequences of high inequality in incomes, assets, and many aspects of well-being in Latin America have recently (re-)emerged as a central research and policy issue. However, many open questions remain that will be dealt with in the contributions to this volume. First, the...