How deep are the roots of Latin America's economic inequalities? In this chapter we survey both the history and the literature about the region's extreme economic disparities, focusing on the most recent academic contributions. We begin by documenting the broad patterns of national and...

Estimating the effect of inequality on crime is challenging due to reverse causality and omitted variable bias. This paper addresses these concerns by exploiting the fact that, as suggested by recent scholarly research, the legacy of slavery is largely manifested in persistent levels of economic...

This paper provides new measures of labor law enforcement across the world. The constructed dataset shows that countries with more stringent de jure regulation tend to enforce less. While civil law countries tend to have more stringent de jure labor codes as predicted by legal origin theory,...

This paper identifies three types of welfare regimes in Africa, based on the insight that tax and expenditure regimes are closely associated. Using cluster analysis, the author highlights historical legacies in current welfare policies, demonstrating that welfare regimes in Africa have been...