The impact of aging on healthcare expenditure (HCE) has been at the center of a prolonged debate. This paper purports to shed light on several issues. First, it presents new evidence on the relative importance of the two components of HCE that have been distinguished by Zweifel, Felder and Meier...

Disability benefits provide social insurance against the risk of losing working capacity, as well as an important source of income for individuals with disabilities. They are also costly and tend to reduce labor supply. Although spending can be contained by careful targeting, correcting past...

This paper examines the implicit subsidies within pension systems across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. We first calculate the theoretical benefits of pension for hypothetical workers in 25 countries in LAC. We show that, on average, LAC's pension systems are subsidized, as they...

We study the effects of a new 1% employment quota enacted in Chile in 2018 using anonymized administrative data on monthly employer-employee linkages and disability certification records. Our firm-level difference-in-difference results show a 15-20% increase in the number of people with...

The use of environmental policy instruments such as eco-labelling and pesticide taxes should preferably be based on disaggregate estimates of the individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for pesticide risk reductions. We review the empirical valuation literature dealing with pesticide risk exposure...

The widespread use of pesticides in agriculture provides a particularly complex pattern of multidimensional negative side-effects, ranging from food safety related effects to the deterioration of farmland ecosystems. The assessment of the economic implications of such negative processes is...

We evaluate the effects of different marketing and distribution techniques on the purchase of Long-Lasting Insecticide-Treated Nets (LL-ITN). Using a randomized controlled trial in urban Senegal, we look at the impacts of receiving information on malaria-related issues and of different sale...

This paper uses microdata from Brazilian natality and mortality vital statistics between 2000 and 2010 to estimate the impact of in-utero exposure to local violence - measured by homicide rates - on birth outcomes. The estimates show that exposure to violence during the first trimester of...

We study how prenatal maternal stress, caused by sustained seismic activity, affects birth outcomes in Chile during the period 2011-2015. A mother-fixed-effect model together with the spatiotemporal variation of earthquakes in Chile allow us to deal with identification issues that have obscured...