In 2007, seeking to increase female labor force participation and more generally ease burdens on working women, the Mexican government introduced an enormous expansion of a child care program: Estancias Infantiles para Apoyar a Madres Trabajadoras (EI). EI covers 90 percent approximately of the...

Using a primary school curricular standard basic mathematics competence test, this paper documents the low level of student achievement amongst 10-18 year old rural children in Bangladesh and tests the extent to which years spent in school increases learning. Our sample includes children...

We address the role that deep, structural factors may have as determinants of Mexico's economic growth. We argue that Mexico's poor growth performance appears to be associated not only with shorter-run events such as the lost decade of the eighties, but also with supply-side features of the...

This paper investigates how gender disparities affect the time to repay group micro-finance loans using survival analysis and hazard decomposition techniques. We also control for the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the time needed by micro-finance loan borrowers to repay. We use a large...

This paper aims to measure the gross output loss due to misallocation of resources in Mexico during 2008-2018 and to study what determines this resource misallocation. To do so, I use an extension of Hsieh and Klenow (2009) and Mexican Economic Censuses. Alternatively, I estimate resource...

We provide experimental evidence on the effects of social disapproval by peers among communities of Uruguayan small-scale fishers exploiting a common pool resource (CPR). We combined this treatment with an in-group (groups from a single community) / mixed group (groups composed of fishers from...

During the 2000s, recurrent food price shocks due to volatility in international markets and extreme weather events affected consumption and nutritional patterns of Mexican urban households. This research quantifies the impacts of food price shocks on the purchase of nutrients and on the weight...

This paper explores the effects of tropical cyclones on the economic activity of establishments in the manufacturing and service sectors in Mexico. The analysis relies on panel data that combines establishment-level economic activity with municipal-level exposure to tropical cyclones on a...

We study the relationship between financial constraints and employment formalization by exploiting heterogeneity in the industry-level degree of financial dependence, in the spirit of Rajan and Zingales (1998). This dependence, and variation in aggregate credit, lets us measure industry-level...

This paper estimates a structural model of household behavior in the presence of cash transfers to recover the amount of resources allocated to men, women, and children. Using data from Ecuador, I find that there are important intra-household inequalities, but the transfer induces a...