In this study we analyze the effects of corruption on income inequality and poverty. Our analysis advances the existing literature in four ways. First, instead of using corruption indices assembled by various investment risk services, we use an objective measure of corruption: the number of...

This paper uses standard fiscal incidence analysis to study how much income redistribution and poverty reduction are accomplished through the fiscal system in eighteen Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. We show there is considerable heterogeneity in the income inequality and...

The relationship between the abundance of natural resources and socio-economic performance has been a main object of study in the economic development field since Adam Smith. Dominated by the verification of the so called curse of natural resource, the mainstream literature on the topic has been...

This paper argues that the assumption of a homogeneous workforce, which is implicitly invoked in the decomposition analysis of changes in welfare indicators, hides the role that schooling and its returns may have on the understanding of these changes. Using Peruvian cross-sectional data for a...

We provide a method to estimate resource shares - the fraction of total household expenditure allocated to each household member - using OLS estimation of Engel curves. The method is a linear reframing of the nonlinear model of Dunbar, Lewbel and Pendakur (2013), extended to allow single-parent...

A key challenge for policymakers is how to design methods to select beneficiaries of social programs when income is volatile and the target population is dynamic. We evaluate a traditional static proxy-means test (PMT) and three policy-relevant alternatives. We use a unique panel dataset of a...

Access to reliable energy is central to improvements in living standards and is a Sustainable Development Goal. This study moves beyond counting the electrified households and examines the effect of the hours of electricity households receives on their welfare. We hypothesize that additional...

This study estimates the effects of the 1970 Ancash earthquake on human capital accumulation on the affected and subsequent generation, 37 years after the shock, using the Peruvian censuses of 1993 and 2007. The main finding is that males affected by the earthquake in utero completed on average...

In this paper we aim to disentangle how sectoral economic growth affects the size of the middle class, using state-level data of Bolivia from 2000 to 2017 and breaking the three main economic activities into subsectors to attain more-specific results. Because the data from Bolivia are limited,...

This study explores the evolution of inequality in Latin America during the COVID-19 pandemic using primary data available from household and employment surveys collected in 2020. Inequality increased on average by 2 percent between 2019 and 2020, twice the average annual growth in the...