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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...