We study the role of fiscal expenditure during episodes of economic crises using one century data from 20 Latin American countries. We use output drops as a way of indicating the irruption of economic crises and we are able to document episodes of large output drops and large duration of...

SThis paper explores how a rise in a gender’s scarcity may impact educational investments using exogenous variation in the marriage market of second generation Americans in early 20th century. Theoretically, one may expect this to occur through two potential channels: a change in matching...

This paper argues that legislative malapportionment, denoting a discrepancy between the share of legislative seats and the share of population held by electoral districts, serves as a tool for predemocratic elites to preserve their political power and economic interests after a transition to...

This paper studies the dynamic effect of networks on location and occupation decisions of immigrants to the United States between 1900 and 1930. We compare the distributions of immigrants both by intended and actual state of residence to counterfactual distributions constructed by allocating the...

This paper studies the effects of land reform on political support for the incumbent party. Using agricultural and housing census data at the county level two major findings are presented. First, using different estimation techniques I found that incumbent support increases in 4-6% in counties...

The evolution of the skill premium (i.e., the wage differential between skilled and unskilled workers) has interest from at least two perspectives: it is a rough measure of inequality among workers of different qualifications and provides information on the characteristics of the development...

Sudden stops and international financial crises have been a main feature of developing countries in the last three decades. While their aggregate effects are well known, the disaggregated channels through which they work are not well explored yet. In this paper, we study the sectoral responses...

Levels of economic development vary widely within countries in the Americas. We argue that part of this variation has its roots in the colonial era. Colonizers engaged in different economic activities in different regions of a country, depending on local conditions. Some activities, such as...

Public schools in Chile receive a per-student subsidy depending on enrollment, and are managed by local governments that operate under soft budget constraints. In this paper, we study the effects of this system on per-student expenditures. Per-student expenditures on rural areas are 30% higher...

Why does schooling attainment vary widely across countries? Why are differences in schooling attainment highly persistent? I show that cross-country differences in schooling are related to political institutions, such as democracy and local democracy (political decentralization), which are...