We study the effects of increasing cash grants on the education attainment of low-income middle and high school students in Mexico. Starting in 2009, the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer (CCT) program increased the average grant in middle and high school by 27 percent for females and 30...

We study the effects of increasing cash grants on the education attainment of low-income middle and high school students in Mexico. Starting in 2009, the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer (CCT) program increased the average grant in middle and high school by 27 percent for females and 30...

In this paper, we test whether promoting digital government tools increases the take-up of an important public health prevention service: cervical cancer screening. We implemented an at-scale field experiment in Uruguay, randomly encouraging women to make medical appointments with a digital...

The authors use a unique data set on language, and mathematics test scores for third, and fourth graders in eleven different Latin American countries, to determine whether child labor raises or lowers school achievement. Their findings are amazingly consistent across countries. In every country,...

Using country-level data, this report lays out the broad stylized facts regarding the relationship between child labor and per capita GDP, adult literacy, and the share of agriculture in the economy. The relationship between child labor force participation and per capita income is convex and...

School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of making schools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decision making by local schools. This article shows that across eight Latin American countries, most of the variation in...

Child labors effect on academic achievement is estimated using unique data on third and fourth graders in nine Latin American countries. Cross country variation in truancy regulations provides an exogenous shift in the ages of children normally in these grades, providing exogenous variation in...

This study examines long-term effects of a minimum wage increase using an innovative identification strategy based on categorising workers according to their predicted marginal revenue products. It finds that the increase had a large and persistent disemployment effects on low-paid workers and...

By allowing agents to switch from entrepreneurship to wage work and vice versa over the life cycle, this study proposes a dynamic Jacks-of-All-Trades (JAT) model where entrepreneurs invest in highly varied skills to manage their business. We simultaneously endogenize human capital investment and...