Most Latin American countries have ABC (acronyms from the Spanish words of voucher, mortgage and savings) designed social housing program. Little is known of the impacts of these programs. In this paper we estimate the welfare affects of twelve of these programs. We estimate whether the programs...

In this paper we present evidence that homeowners are happier than nonhomeowners and it is homeownership that causes the difference in happiness. The data used is for seventeen Latin American countries obtained from the LatinBarometer surveys. The association between homeownership and happiness...

In this paper we evaluate the targeting efficiency of Latin American housing programs of the demand-side- ABC type, acronyms based on the Spanish words for savings-voucher-mortgage. These are the typical; housing programs in Latin American countries. However, there is no systematic evaluation of...

In this paper we estimate the size of shelter induced poverty by housing tenure in Latin America and determine whether public housing programs of the ABC type (programs that require savings, provide vouchers and with the residual financed through a public or privately provided mortgage for a...

High delinquency rate of publicly provided mortgages in social housing programs are often interpreted to be due to moral hazard. In this paper we show that the typically used parametric approaches give misleading results due to overlooked confounding and selection biases. We show that by using...

Many public programs and operations by multilateral organisations include technical assistance to the direct beneficiaries of the program in addition to pure financing. However, there is no substantial body of studies that calculates the additional impact; in the sense of exclusively...

It has become common wisdom amongst monetary policy professionals that central banks in Latin America should adopt inflation targeting. Pure inflation targeting implicitly assumes a social loss welfare function dependent on only inflation. In this paper using subjective well-being survey data...

This paper evaluates Progressive Housing Program; a public housing program that facilitates the purchase of a new home. The evaluation finds that the program’s package (savings requirement, voucher and mortgage) design is inappropriate if the program is targeted to the poor. In fact the...

This paper examines the association between trust and community involvement with fear of crime. Fear of crime is measured by three typical perception measures: neighborhood security; walking alone in the dark; and the risk of becoming a victim. The data is from Chile’s Victimization Survey....

This paper tests the hysteresis hypothesis in unemployment for 13 Latin American countries covering the period 1980-2005. The tests exploit the time series and the cross sectional variation of the series, and allows for cross section dependence and a different number of endogenously determined...