This paper analyzes various dimensions of the quality of life in Montevideo. The paper finds that satisfaction with various public goods and services at the neighborhood level play a minor role in the overall reported well-being of individuals and in the satisfaction of life domains, such as...

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...

This paper investigates the effects of short-run economic shocks on children`s progress through school in urban Brazil using a unique panel data set. The severe problem of grade repetition in Brazil contributes to overall low education levels. Of children ages 10-15 who are enrolled in school,...

This paper focuses on fertility choices in Brazil, a country where soap operas (novelas) portray families that are much smaller than in reality, to study the effects of television on individual behavior. Using Census data for the period 1970-1991, the paper finds that women living in areas...

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se trata el patrón cambiante de los ingresos de capitales a los países en desarrollo. El análisis se ve considerablemente distorsionado por acontecimientos recientes. Se concentra en los hechos, desarrollos y políticas principales...

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...

The gender of the household head has often been treated as an exogenous determinant of homeownership. This paper argues that several determinants of homeownership also affect household headship and that failing to explicitly account for this endogeneity leads to inconsistent results. Using...

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 provides a summary of the work in seven papers of a Latin American Research Network project intended to identify the following information. The private and public determinants of child anthropometrics; The extent to which the private and public determinants interact and whether...

Raising labor productivity is recognized as a critical factor for increasing economic growth and reducing poverty levels in Latin America. Low levels of education continue to be singled out as the main obstacle to higher productivity in the region. We examine the scope for education to lift...