This paper presents a series of experiments on discrimination in urban Lima, Peru. The experiments exploit degrees of information on performance as a way to assess how personal characteristics affect how people sort into groups, and the results show that behavior is not correlated with personal...

The incomplete privatization of the electric sector in Peru provides a unique scenario for evaluating the impact of public versus private provision. The results in this paper suggest that management of electricity firms by the private sector leads to a significant improvement in the quality of...

This paper analyzes the evolution of gender differences in school attendance and attainment in Latin America and the Caribbean, for both adults who left the educational system and children in school. For individuals 21 years old and above the paper uses a cohort analysis of school attainment....

This paper examines the short and long-run average causal impact of catastrophic natural disasters on economic growth by combining information from comparative case studies. The counterfactual of the cases studied is assessed by constructing synthetic control groups, taking advantage of the fact...

This paper compares the optimal dynamic choices between policies of mitigation and adaptation for three economies: Brazil, Chile and the United States. The focus is on the optimal role of mitigation and adaptation for “environmentally small economies,” i. e. , economies that are witnessing...

There are few reliable estimates of the effects of violence on economic outcomes. This study exploits the manifold increase in homicides in 2008-2011 in Mexico resulting from its war on organized drug traffickers to estimate the effect of drug- related homicides on housing prices. Using an...

Latin America has a comparative advantage in deforestation compared to other forms of climate change mitigation. Thus, to the extent that Latin America should engage in mitigation, the optimal climate change policy should manage these advantages by generating incentives in Latin America to deal...

Since the beginning of the 1980s, the world has undergone a major shift in thinking about the appropriate economic role of the state. Privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has been at the heart of this change. The track record on privatization, however, is still very limited. This...

Casi diez años después de la privatización de importantes empresas paraestatales (EPE) del Perú, el balance apriorístico aún no queda claro. En este artículo se analiza el impacto de la privatización mediante un detallado análisis estadístico y econométrico de, en primer lugar, la...

El enfoque de esta documento es analizar la problemática de la posesión y acceso a activos por parte de los pobres. Los activos privados, públicos y de organización son los principales determinantes del flujos de gastos e ingresos de las familias, y son por lo tanto cruciales para determinar...