Between 2000 and 2010, the Gini coefficient declined in 13 of 17 Latin American countries. The decline was statistically significant and robust to changes in the time interval, inequality measures, and data sources. In-depth country studies for Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico suggest two main...

Given the substantial amount of resources currently invested in microcredit programs, it is more important than ever to accurately assess the extent to which peer monitoring by borrowers faced with group liability contracts actually reduces moral hazard. We conduct a field experiment with women...

This paper shows that the evolution of the level of Mexico real and real per capita output between 1895 and 2008 can be adequately described through a trendstationary model, affected by 4 structural breaks, which occurred at dates that seem to coincide with domestic institutional arrangements,...

During the last years, Mexico has registered relatively large output falls. The business cycle accounting method of Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2007) is applied to the two most recent recessions in Mexico (including the 'Tequila crisis') in order to understand what are the most important wedges...

This document presents an alternative to measure informal economic activity at the municipal level for the 2013-2020 period in Mexico. Using satellite images of nightlight and microdata from the 2019 Economic Census, the formal and informal Value Added at the municipal level is estimated using a...

This paper studies the behavior of investment during demographic transitions. In particular, I focus on the period where the working age to population ratio reaches its maximum, namely the demographic window. I document that in Europe, Asia, and Oceania investment rates are higher 15 years...

This paper follows an algorithm that considers different dimensions of linkages across service and manufacturing industries to identify a cluster configuration of the Mexican economy and analyze their role in the economic performance of regions. It identifies 24 clusters and analyzes their...

We estimate a supply and demand model of private college education services in Mexico for the 2005-2019 period, in order to identify the factors that influenced the dynamics of their equilibrium prices. The model is estimated with two- and three-stage least squares using panel data at the state...

The depth of and access to financial services provided by banks throughout Latin America are extremely low in spite of its recognized importance for economic activity, employment and poverty alleviation. Low financial depth and access hurts the poor the most and is due to a variety of obstacles...

After a decade of economic and political reforms that dramatically altered the structure of economies in Latin America, poverty and high inequality remain deeply entrenched. Integration into the global economy in the 1990s brought increased prosperity only to a small minority of households in...