This study describes how minority enrollment probabilities respond to changes in admission policies from affirmative-action to merit-only programs and then to percentage plans when the demographic composition of the potential pool of applicants is also shifting. It takes advantage of admission...

The private provision of educational services has been representing an increasing fraction of the Peruvian schooling system, especially in recent decades. While there have been many claims about the differences in quality between private and public schools, there is no complete assessment of the...

Many developing countries have adopted the market approach for expanding the supply of child care, but little is known about the economic behavior of independent providers. This paper draws on uniquely rich administrative data on child care centers and their inputs from São Paulo to examine the...

This paper examines whether an expansion in the supply of public preschool crowds out private enrollment, using rich data for municipalities in Brazil from 2000-2006, where federal transfers to local governments change discontinuously with given population thresholds. Results from a...

In today’s knowledge-based societies, understanding basic scientific concepts and the capacity to structure and solve scientific questions is more critical than ever. Accordingly, in this paper we test an innovative methodology for teaching science and environment in public primary schools...

The literature on aid effectiveness has focused more on recipient policies than the determinants of aid allocation yet a consistent result is that political allies obtain more aid from donors than non-allies. This paper shows that aid allocated to political allies is ineffective for growth,...

This paper presents an impact evaluation of a revamped version of the Dominican youth training program Juventud y Empleo. The paper analyzes the impact of the program on traditional labor market outcomes and on outcomes related to youth behavior and life style, expectations about the future and...

This paper tests the hysteresis hypothesis in unemployment for 13 Latin American countries covering the period 1980-2005. The tests exploit the time series and the cross sectional variation of the series, and allows for cross section dependence and a different number of endogenously determined...

Analyzing the experience of Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 'Lessons from NAFTA' aims to provide guidance to Latin American and Caribbean countries considering free trade agreements with the United States. The authors conclude that the treaty raised external trade...