This paper explores for the first time the impact of a demand-driven training program on labor turnover at both firm and worker level. Launched in 2014 by the Ministry of Development, Industry and Trade (MDIC in Portuguese), Pronatec-MDIC allows firms to demand courses which some of their...

Despite the renewed interest in technical education, only a handful of studies analyze its effect on academic outcomes. In this paper we apply a regression discontinuity design to oversubscribed technical high school tracks in Pernambuco, Brazil, to identify the impact of technical education...

This paper presents and comparatively analyzes three case studies of productive development agencies (PDAs) in Brazil: Embrapa, Finep, and ABC Foundation. Following a discussion of the main hypotheses and the methodology employed, the paper describes each case, the related counterfactual and an...

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms provide their workers with skills that are sufficiently general to be potentially useful for competitors. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in industry-specific human capital, then make wage offers for each...

In-service teacher training aims to improve the supply of public education. A randomized experiment was conducted in Mexico to test whether teacher training could increase teacher efficiency in public secondary schools. After seven and a half months of exposure to a trained teacher, students...

This paper brings new evidence on the impact of The Peruvian Job Youth Training Program (Projoven). Compared with prior evaluations of the program, this one has several advantages. This is the first experimental impact evaluation of Projoven, and also the first to measure impacts over a longer...

Teenage pregnancy in the Dominican Republic represents a persistent development challenge. This paper uses data from a randomized impact evaluation of the youth training program Juventud y Empleo, which includes soft-skills training, to examine its impact on teenage pregnancy. We find that the...

This paper presents the results of a randomized controlled trial on the long-term impacts of a youth training program. The empirical analysis estimates labor market impacts six years after the training - including long-term labor market trajectories of young people - and, it is one of the first...