Export promotion agencies provide exporters with a broad range of services, going from counseling to sponsoring their participation in international trade missions and fairs. These services may have heterogeneous effects and thus contribute differently to achieve the goals of these...

Entering new export markets is primarily a discrete choice. Even though several empirical papers have used modeling strategies consistent with this fact, no study has examined the effects of public policies aimed at affecting this decision within this setting. In this paper we assess the impact...

This paper contributes to an agenda that views the effects of policies and institutional reforms as dependent on the structure of political incentives for national and subnational political actors. The paper studies political incentive structures at the subnational level and the mechanisms...

This paper estimates the impact of two productive development programs (PDPs) in Costa Rica: PROPYME and CR Provee. The first seeks to increase the capacity of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) to innovate, and the second aims to increase backward linkages between Costa Rican SMEs and...

Government-owned development banks have often been justified by the need to respond to financial market imperfections that hinder the establishment and growth of promising businesses, and as a result, stifle economic development more generally. However, evidence on the effectiveness of these...

This paper assesses the impact of a cluster development policy in Latin America. A Local Productive Arrangement (APL) is a cluster of firms within the same territory, operating around the same activity and maintaining ties of cooperation and learning among themselves and with other stakeholders....

The paper investigates the relationship between government interventions to promote investments in innovation and firms-financed R&D. Merging a unique panel data set on Argentinean firms in the 1990s with a data base on different types of public support received through FONTAR program, we...

This paper analyzes the evolution and current profile of teacher unionization and estimate the impact of unionization on the quality of public education in Peru. The research uses data from a 1999 household survey (ENAHO) and from a recent evaluation of a public program oriented to improve the...

The paper uses microeconomic data to characterize entrepreneurs by income group and selected household, individual and business characteristics, finding that entrepreneurship is rare but more frequent in the upper class than the middle or lower classes. Middle-class entrepreneurs are, on...