Despite a recent expansion in housing finance, Brazil still faces a severe housing shortage, especially among lower-income people, and it is important to examine the development, limitations and prospects of the country`s housing finance market. This paper investigates the recent evolution of...

The goal of this paper is to study the link between bank credit (and internal funding) and average firm size in Argentina. Besides the fact that economic growth tends to go hand in hand with larger firm size, the topic is of particular interest because of the severe credit crunch in Argentina in...

This study examines the use of incentive mechanisms for employees in export and investment promotion agencies intended to improve their performance. It briefly describes these organizations and presents the contributions from economic theory that are useful to understand the agency problems that...

This paper attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of Bolivia’s labor market institutions, particularly the Plan Nacional de Empleo de Emergencia (PLANE). It is found that unemployment as conventionally defined may not be the most important problem in Bolivia’s labor market, as the...

This study contends that in Mexico there is a threshold above which drug-trafficking-related violence causes a general slowdown in the economy. Before that threshold is reached, firms and individuals pay for the increase in violence via protective security costs, a decision that is reflected in...

The formality status of a job is the most widely used indicator of job quality in developing countries. However, a number of studies argue that, at least for some workers, the informality status may be driven by choice rather than exclusion. This paper uses job satisfaction data from three...

In this paper, the authors examine levels and trends of labor market outcomes for women in the 1990¿s using household survey data for 18 Latin American countries covering several years per country. The outcomes we analyze include labor force participation rates, the distribution of employment...

La presente nota técnica presenta un panorama del mercado laboral chileno y su contexto a nivel nacional. Esta nota incluye un diagnóstico del sector, la programación del BID para el período 2010-2014 y una matriz de resultados.

The proposal by Levy (2008) whereby a universal social insurance (USI) scheme is guaranteed to all workers, regardless of formality status, aims at abolishing the current contributory social insurance system and financing social insurance through value-added taxes instead (henceforth, the social...

En el presente documento se ilustran los diferentes patrones de participación de la mujer en el mercado laboral en países de América Latina y el Caribe (ALC), y se investigan los factores determinantes subyacentes de los diferentes patrones. Las autoras examinen los niveles y tendencias en...