We document changes in income and earnings inequality in the five Central American countries from the early 1990s to 2009. In the 1990s Costa Rica had the most equal distribution of income in Central America, and one of the most equal distributions of income in Latin America. At the other...

This study considers the economic impact of Covid-19 on enterprises in four Central American countries – El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. At the time of the analysis neither the pandemic nor its economic consequences had fully run their course. It is not, therefore, a definitive...

A recent surge in child migration to the U.S. from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala has occurred in the context of high rates of regional violence. But little quantitative evidence exists on the causal relationship between violence and international emigration in this or any other region....

Using data from the United States spanning the period between 1970 and 2017, we analyze the economic assimilation of subsequent arrival cohorts of Mexican and Central American immigrants, the more economically disadvantaged group of immigrants. We compare their wage and employment probability to...

After-school programs (ASP) that keep youth protected while engaging them in socio-emotional learning might address school-based violent behaviors. This paper experimentally studies the socio-emotional-learning component of an ASP targeted to teenagers in public schools in the most violent...

Fungibility of money is a central principle in economics. It implies that any unit of money is substitutable for another and that the composition of income is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many subjects do not treat money as...

Job quality may usefully be thought of as depending on both job values (how much workers care about different job outcomes) and the job outcomes themselves. Here both cross-section and panel data are used to examine changes in job quality in OECD countries over the 1990s. Despite rising wages...

Societies are characterized by customs governing the allocation of non-market goods such as marital partnerships. We explore how such customs affect the educational investment decisions of young singles and the subsequent joint labor supply decisions of partnered couples. We consider two...

We develop a general equilibrium model that highlights the trade-offs between physical and digital forms of retail central bank money. The key differences between cash and central bank digital currency (CBDC) include transaction efficiency, possibilities for tax evasion, and, potentially,...

We explore the relationship between gambling and other forms of risk-taking behaviour, i.e. exposure to debt and the use of credit, at the individual and household level using representative pooled cross-section data drawn from the UK Expenditure and Food Surveys (EFS), 2001 to 2007. Gambling...