We study the socioeconomic gradient of child development on a sample of low- and middle-income children aged 6–42 months in Bogota using the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development. We find an average difference of 0.53, 0.42, and 0.49 standard deviations (SD) in cognition,...

Previous empirical literature has found a sharp decline in consumption during the first years of retirement, implying that individuals do not save enough for their retirement. This phenomenon is called the retirement consumption puzzle. We find no evidence of the retirement consumption puzzle...

The paper studies the effects of Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer program implemented in rural areas in Colombia since 2002, on school enrollment and child labor. Using a difference-in-difference framework, our results show that the program increased school participation of...

Youth unemployment in Latin America is exceptionally high, as much as 50% among the poor. Vocational training may be the best chance to help unemployed young people at the bottom of the income distribution. This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized training program for disadvantaged youth...

The paper studies the effects of Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer programme implemented in rural areas in Colombia in 2002, on school enrolment and child labour. Using a quasi-experimental approach, our methodology makes use of an interesting feature of the data, which allows us...

In this paper we argue that once one departs from the simple classroom example, or `stripped down life-cycle model,' the empirical model for consumption growth can be made flexible enough to fit the main features of the data. More specifically, we show that allowing demographics to affect...

Using data from an experiment conducted in 70 Colombian communities, we investigate who pools risk with whom when trust is crucial for enforcing risk pooling arrangements. We explore the roles played by risk attitudes and social networks. Both empirically and theoretically, we find that close...

This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized training program for disadvantaged youth introduced in Colombia in 2005. This randomized trial offers a unique opportunity to examine the impact of training in a middle income country. We use originally collected data on individuals randomly...

We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children. We estimate production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills as a function of...

We investigate partial insurance and group risk sharing in extended family networks. Our approach is based on decomposing income shocks into group aggregate and idiosyncratic components, allowing us to measure the extent to which each is insured, having accounted for public insurance programs....