"The returns to schooling or the skill premium is a key parameter in various literatures, including globalization and inequality and international migration. This paper explores the skill premium and its link to exports in Latin America, thus linking the skill premium to the emerging literature...

The main issue of this paper is to study infant mortality in Latin America in recent decades. In so doing, two questions must be answered: First, how large is the economic loss in terms of net national product due to child mortality under the age of 15 and what are the major causes of death?...

In this paper I analyze the evolution of economic and social conditions in Latin America from the 1950s through the 1980s, when deep external crises erupted in country after country. The point of departure of our story is the political awakening of the region in the late 1950s and early 1960s...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

Africa and Latin America secured their independence from European colonial rule a century and half apart: most of Latin America after 1820 and most of Africa after 1960. Despite the distance in time and space, they share important similarities. In each case independence was followed by political...

The paper stresses the evolutionary and adaptive experience of Latin American growth between 1950 and 1980, and provides a synthetic view by considering the sources of growth within a simple production framework. Regressions use quinquennial panel data for 18 Latin American countries.They...

This paper examines sovereign lending to Latin America and the Caribbean from 1820 to 1913. We examine four waves of capital flows where defaults were followed by a return to market access. In spite of extended default, countries kept promising high returns that attracted international investors...

The share of US residents who were born in Latin America and the Caribbean plateaued recently, after a half century of rapid growth. Our review of the evidence on the US immigration wave from the region suggests that it bears many similarities to the major immigration waves of the 19th and early...