This paper examines how the adoption of the Australian ballot (AB), and ipso facto, the transition from the nominal to effective secret vote, shaped the nature of party politics in Brazil. Engaging the literature on political clientelism, the impact of the AB on three outcomes is studied: 1) the...

In a society composed of a ruler and its citizens: what are the determinants of the political equilibrium between these two? This paper approaches this problem as a game played between a ruler who has to decide the distribution of the aggregate income and a group of agents/citizens who have the...

The British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order whereby the landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classesas the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...

In this paper we analyze the role of economic growth in the recent deceleration of female labor force participation (LFP) in Latin America. We study the relationship between the business cycle and female LFP by estimating fixed effects models, using data from harmonized national household...

Canonical human capital theories posit that education, by enhancing worker skills, reduces the likelihood that a worker will be laid-off during times of economic change. Yet, this has not been demonstrated causally. We link administrative education records from 1987 through 2002 to nationally...

Recent studies document that, in many cases, the schools that parents prefer over others do not improve student test scores. This could be because (a) parents cannot discern schools causal impacts, and/or (b) parents value schools that improve outcomes not well-measured by test scores. To shed...

This paper examines the impact on unemployment, unemployment distribution, wages and welfare of Youth Unemployment Programmes (YUPs). The aim of YUP is to increase the number of young people acquiring skills. We assume that the YUPs are a complete success and consequently analyse what happens...

This paper examins the macroeconomic effects of youth unemployement programmes in the form of vocational training (YUPs), developing a two sector general equilibrium model featuring matching frictions and worker-firm wage bargaining for skilled workers. Unskilled sector wages are indexed to...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...