Spanish Abstract: La Tasa Social de Descuento (TSD) para un país es un parámetro relevante en el Análisis Costo Beneficio que permite descontar los flujos de beneficios y costos económicos (sociales) futuros de un proyecto o un programa a un periodo presente. El objetivo del presente...

We analyze the impact of rural electricity access on different educational outcomes for children by taking advantage of the priorization criteria of the brazilian program Luz Para Todos (LPT) which determines an assignment variable that extracts the exogenous variation in rural electricity...

Spanish Abstract: Este documento presenta el análisis cualitativo de complementariedades y sinergias entre los programas de protección social Estrategia Unidos y Familias en Acción, y el programa de inclusión productiva Familias en su Tierra, diseñados e implementados en Colombia por...

Can transport infrastructure promote intergenerational mobility? This paper estimates the causal impact of the railroad network on intergenerational occupation mobility in nineteenth century England and Wales. We create a new dataset of father and son pairs by linking individuals across the 100%...

This paper separately evaluates how devolution and accountability, two distinct aspects of the decentralization reforms implemented in Indonesia in the year 2001, influenced the public provision of water services. Using household level data it is found that the devolution of responsibility does...

Exchanging one's vote for particularistic benefits - practices usually grouped under 'clientelism' - is often thought to weaken programmatic links between citizens and politicians and disincentivize public good provision, as well as undermine voter autonomy and the ideal role of elections....

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...

Tax evasion lies at the core of the relationship between citizens and the state: it reflects the level of trust in the state and compliance with society's implicit ‘social contract'. However, empirically analyzing it is challenging, with few direct and reliable measures. This has hampered the...

Customs face a difficult tradeoff between, on one side, collecting tariff revenues and preventing smuggling, and on the other side, avoiding creating additional barriers to trade. They also tend to concentrate discretionary power in the hands of officials whose decisions can bear high costs for...

We describe some features of the political environment in Colombia, drawing from a unique panel dataset of about 10,000 households. Contrasting responses in 2013 and 2016, we document a persistent lack of interest in politics and prevailing clientelism, with personalistic links dominating...