This paper uses 113 household surveys from 18 Latin American countries to document patterns in secondary school graduation rates over the period 1990–2010. It is found that enrollment and graduation rates increased dramatically during that period, while dropout rates decreased. Two...

This paper shows that returns to education are not enough to capture all the returns to human capital. Using longitudinal data of all college graduates in Colombia, we estimate labor market returns to postsecondary degrees and to various skills— including literacy, numeracy, foreign language,...

While economists have tended to focus on specific public policies when developing recommendations, the achievement of welfare objectives might depend more on the quality of policies than their content. This paper develops several measures of the qualities of policies across countries, arguing...

This paper introduces preliminary evidence from a cross-country database of policy characteristics and potential uses of that database. While most databases have emphasized either the content of policies (e. g. , size of government deficits) or countries' formal institutions (e. g. , political...

Veto player theory argues that a higher number of veto players lowers the likelihood of change; in turn, policies that do not change help to sustain commitments but may prevent adaptation to changing circumstances. This paper challenges that claim by arguing that policy stability does not...

Following the research strategy put in practice in the project behind Stein et al. (2008), Policymaking in Latin America: How Politics Shapes Policies, this project will be a collective and interactive process among various country teams and the coordinators. We will build a number of country...

This paper proposes an agenda for the study of the determinants and the processes by which strong policymaking institutions emerge, with emphasis on the most central democratic institution: the legislature. It reviews extant theories of institutionalization, and proposes further ways of...

The literature on taxes and public finance generally focuses on revenues, an easily observable and generally available variable, as the observable measure of tax policy. Still, revenues depend on many determinants other than the political will and policy objectives of the government. It is...

The understanding of the economic effect of formal institutional rules has progressed substantially in recent decades. These formal analyses have tended to take for granted that institutional arenas such as Congress are the places where decision-making takes place. That is a good approximation...

The literature has identified that countries with higher levels of openness tend to present a larger government sector as a way to reduce the risks to the economy that openness entails. This paper argues that there are a number of policies that can mitigate trade-induced risks, many of which do...