When sampled individuals are not found at home, many surveys rely on a proxy respondent: another knowledgeable household member. We study the difference between self- and proxy-reported labor income in Mexico. We use the ...

This paper studies the effect of a civil service reform on the skills profile of new teachers in Mexico. The reform mandated the use of rule-based recruitment over discretionary hiring. Our results show that the reform ...

This paper studies the impact of high dismissal protection on bureaucratic turnover and productivity in the context of public school teachers in Chile. We take advantage of a law that required education administrators ...

Although longer school days are in increasing supply, a lack of consensus about their effectiveness persists. Motivated by this gap, this paper studies the effect of enrolling in a new set of full-time secondary schools ...

Workers at subnational governments play a prominent role in the delivery of public services in most countries. Yet, information about their remuneration is scarce. Using data for Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay, we document ...

The incidence of patronage can vary widely across levels of gov ernment within a country. We show this in the context of Brazil, which has been the focus of most recent research on patronage. In particular, we find that ...

We show that bureaucrats can exploit discretion in hiring decisions to engage in forms of favoritism that hinder organizational performance. We do this in the context of the Mexican federal judiciary. The arrival of a judge ...

El cierre sin precedentes de las escuelas en casi todos los países y el efecto de la pandemia del COVID-19 en los ingresos y el bienestar de las familias han afectado negativamente los aprendizajes y la trayectoria educativa ...

This paper studies how the admission of a student to an elite school changes the schooling outcomes of younger cohorts in the student’s origin school in Peru. Using a sharp regression discontinuity design, the analysis ...

This paper documents a novel stylized fact: many teachers in Latin America have very low levels of cognitive skills. This skills deficit is the result of both low levels of competencies among the population and a gap between ...