Latin American countries have some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. However, earnings inequality significantly changed over the last three decades, increasing during the 1980s and 1990s, declining sharply in the 2000s, and stagnating or even increasing in some countries...

I study the causal effect of the foreign aid for development assistance —implemented by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)— on the intensity of municipality-level armed conflict in Colombia, for the period 2009-2013. To address potential endogeneity biases, I use a...

Across the world, the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has disproportionately affected economically disadvantaged groups. This differential impact has numerous possible explanations, each with significantly different policy implications. We examine, for the first time in a low- or middle-income...

Rural poverty, a widespread problem for the Paraguayan government over the last decade – as well as for other economies in the region – , led to the implementation, in 2016 and 2017, of the “Sembrando Oportunidades Familia por Familia” pilot program, an initiative based on the graduation...

This document presents the results of the qualitative analysis on the understanding of well-being and the changes in life satisfaction, aspirations and expectations in the participants of the Produciendo por mi Futuro program in Colombia, a poverty-reduction intervention implemented by...

As part of the Colombian government's strategy to support the armed-conflict victims, a Graduation Program called "Transformando Mi Futuro" (Transforming my future) was implemented. Unlike other graduation programs, this one targets the urban population and has no assets transfers. To evaluate...

This work develops a model of endogenous criminal activities to study the effects of inequality of opportunities and social mobility on the crime level. In particular, a general equilibrium model derived from the economic theory of conflict is proposed, in which a group of heterogeneous agents...

We study the nature of regional inequality in Colombia over the past 200 years. The main empirical fact is that regional inequality has been highly persistent despite the large changes that have taken place and the modernization of the society. We show that regional inequality is highly...