The purpose of this dissertation is to address policy makers to change the way they think about increasing obesity rates. So far the discussion revolves around increasing incomes and imposing taxes on high fat food, despite their disputed effectiveness. Most of these studies seem to neglect the...

Development: an overview -- Basic needs and poverty -- Education, health and human development -- Population and development -- Income inequality, unemployment and inflation -- Agriculture sector and development -- Industry sector and development -- Service sector and development --...

Understanding underdevelopment -- The surge and partial retreat of democracy -- Religion and politics -- The politics of cultural pluralism and ethnic conflict -- Women and development -- The politics of the rural and urban poor -- Revolutionary change -- Soldiers and politics -- The political...

During the last few years, the newly coined term middle-income trap has been widely used by policymakers to refer to the middle-income economies that seem to be stuck in the middle-income range. However, there is no accepted definition of the term in the literature. In this paper, we study...

This paper asks, first, whether today's developing economies can achieve high-income status without first building large manufacturing sectors. We find that practically every economy that enjoys a high income today experienced a manufacturing employment share in excess of 18%-20% sometime since...

The dissertation at hand is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 presents an impact evaluation of a widely spread conditional cash transfer in Brazil called Bolsa Família. We analyze the impacts of the program on two educational outcomes: enrollment and attendance. In our analysis we consider...

Acknowledgements -- Preface / Mario Damill, Martín Rapetti and Guillermo Rozenwurcell -- An introduction to Roberto Frenkel's contributions to the economic ideas in Latin America / Mario Damill, Daniel Kampel and Guillermo Rozenwurcell -- Pricing decisions, inflation and stabilization --...