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 ...

We show that local politicians’ probability of being employed by a municipality increases when they have a strong party connection to its mayor. Using a regression discontinuity design, we compare the employment outcomes ...

We study whether the existence of opportunities to extract rents in a job affects the type of individuals who are attracted to it. We design a laboratory experiment in which individuals choose between two contracts, each ...