This study constructs a new data set on unemployment rates in Latin America and the Caribbean and then explores the determinants of unemployment. We compare different countries, finding that unemployment is influenced by the size of the rural population and that the effects of government...

This paper summarizes the main lessons learned from Law and Employment: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean, a forthcoming NBER book. It places Latin American economies and economic policies in a world context. The paper quantifies the cost of regulation in Latin America and OECD Europe...

This paper discusses theoretical and practical issues related to long-term care (LTC) services in Latin America. Demand for these services will rise as the region undergoes a swift demographic transition from its currently young population to a rapidly aging one, especially since the region's...

Strategies based on growth and inequality reduction require a long-run horizon, and this paper therefore argues that those strategies need to be complemented by poverty alleviation programs. With regards to such programs, informality in Latin America and the Caribbean is a primary obstacle to...

The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine marked a turning point in American foreign policy. In 1904, President Roosevelt announced that, not only were European powers not welcome in the Americas, but that the U.S. had the right to intervene in the affairs of Central American and Caribbean...

Emancipation of slaves in the 1830s transformed the political elites of the British-Caribbean plantation islands. New elites were more accountable to the citizenry. We develop a theory in which two factors limit and possibly reverse the effect of this on political outcomes, with legislators (i)...

Using US Census data for 1990-2000, we estimate effects of NAFTA on US wages. We look for effects of the agreement by industry and by geography, measuring each industry's vulnerability to Mexican imports, and each locality's dependance on vulnerable industries. We find evidence of both effects,...

The effects of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are disputed. In this paper, we assess these effects using capital market data and an event-study approach, using a daily data set covering a thousand announcements spanning over eighty economies and a hundred RTAs over twenty recent years. We...

This paper infers the terms of trade effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTA's) with the structural gravity model. Using panel data methods to resolve two way causality between trade and FTA's, we estimate direct FTA effects on bilateral trade volume in 2 digit manufacturing goods from 1990-2002....

We combine data on trade, production, and input use to compute the value added content of trade for forty-two countries from 1970 to 2009. For the world, the ratio of value added to gross trade falls by ten to fifteen percentage points, with two-thirds of this decline in the last two decades....