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 ...

The existence of large child penalties on women’s labor market outcomes has been documented for multiple countries and time periods. In this paper, we assess to what extent marriage decisions and pregnancies (including ...

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 documents spatial patterns in intergenerational mobility at the top of the educational distribution and assess the role of public policies in increasing educational opportunities. Our analysis relies on novel ...

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 ...

En el marco de la pandemia de la COVID-19 el presente estudio busca brindar evidencia sobre la efectividad de una estrategia integral en la contención del virus implementada por el Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires ...

We estimate the impact of railroad and road infrastructure on local economic development through the study of massive transport infrastructure changes in Argentina. Following a World Bank study, 10,000 kilometers of railroads ...

Policy makers and international organizations often argue that teenage pregnancy affects girls’ life trajectories by, for example, limiting their employment opportunities. These concerns are amplified in regions with high ...