What should researchers do when confronted with surprising results? Financial access innovations usually leave "temptation" spending unaffected or reduced. However, we found that promotion of savings lockboxes in a largely autarkic society increased alcohol consumption and blood pressure,...

Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the Bolivian economy. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the political economy of macroeconomic policymaking in Bolivia since the 1952 Revolution. Great stress is put on the weakness of fiscal institutions in the face of heavy social and sectoral demands....

After the economic reforms that followed the National Revolution of the 1950s, Bolivia seemed positioned for sustained growth. Indeed, it achieved unprecedented growth from 1960 to 1977. The rapid accumulation of debt due to persistent deficits and a fixed exchange rate policy during the 1970s...

The returns to schooling and the skill premium are key parameters in various fields and policy debates, including the literatures on globalization and inequality, international migration, and technological change. This paper explores the skill premium and its correlation with exports in Latin...

The Bolivian experience suggests that, even in highly indexed economies, exchange rate auctions can work. After introduction of its auction, the Bolsin, not only did the parallel market premium for dollars all but disappear in Bolivia, but the Boliviano exchange rate remained surprisingly...

By any standard, Bolivia's economic crisis in the 1980's has been extraordinary. Like its neighbors. Bolivia suffered from major external shocks, but the extent of economic collapse in the face of these shocks (including a hyperinflation during 1984-85) suggests that internal factors as well as...

This paper examines the patterns of defaults, renegotiations, and final settlements on foreign borrowing of several Latin American governments in the interwar period. One goal of the paper is to provide a detailed historical account of the borrowing and renegotiation experience of five Latin...

Natural-resource taxation and investment exhibit cycles in a vast number of countries, driving political turmoil and power shifts. Using a rational-expectations model, we show cycles result from governments' inability to commit to future taxes and firms' inability to credibly exit a country...

We develop a framework to estimate the economic value of a recent zoning reform in the city of Sao Paulo, which altered maximum permitted construction at the city-block level. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, we find that developers file for more multi-family construction permits...

We advance a novel hypothesis that China's recent anti-corruption campaign may have contributed to the recent resurgence of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China as an unintended consequence. We explore the nexus between the anti-corruption campaign and the SOE resurgence by presenting...