We estimate the impact of a large anti-poverty program – the Uruguayan PANES – on political support for the government that implemented it. The program mainly consisted of a monthly cash transfer for a period of roughly two and half years. Using the discontinuity in program assignment based...

It is common to hear the argument that poor labour market performance in OECD countries in recent years is the result of shifts in relative demand against less-skilled workers. But, there is much dispute about whether these trends have been occurring and, if they have, how important they are in...

This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro data on the universe of Junior High school students in Uruguay to measure the effect of grade failure on students' subsequent school outcomes. Exploiting the discontinuity induced by a rule establishing automatic grade failure for pupils missing...

Immigration to the UK has risen in the past 10 years and has had a measurable effect on the supply of different types of labour. But, existing studies of the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK (e.g. Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston, 2005) have failed to find any...

This paper explores the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980 and the late 1990s. In contrast to the view that sees minimum wages as an ineffective redistributive tool in developing countries, we find that the...

Changes in the relative wages of workers with different amounts of education have profound implications for developing countries, where initial levels of inequality are often very high. In this paper we use micro data for five Latin American countries over the 1980s and 1990s to document trends...

85 percent of Italian men aged 18-33 live with their parents. We argue that Italian parents like to live with their children and a rise in their income makes it possible for them to offer their children higher consumption in exchange for their presence at home. Children prefer to live on their...

This paper presents a model in which wages throughout the economy depend only on the labour market conditions in some low-unemployment sector. In equilibrium, a labour demand shift towards the primary sector tends to raise the unemployment rate everywhere else in the economy and leaves wages...

Latin America and the Caribbean have become in the last decade or so a formidable laboratory for the design and implementation of innovative social policies. In the face of an unprecedented surge in the number of non-contributory social assistance benefit programs in the region, there is a...

This paper uses microdata from Brazilian natality and mortality vital statistics between 2000 and 2010 to estimate the impact of in-utero exposure to local violence - measured by homicide rates - on birth outcomes. The estimates shows that exposure to violence during the first trimester of...