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...

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...

Volunteering is a dominant social force that signals a healthy state. However, although the literature on volunteering is extensive, knowledge on how life’s discontinuities (life event shocks) affect volunteering is limited because most studies work with static (cross-sectional) data. To...

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...

Between 2000 and 2013, Latin America has considerably reduced poverty (from 46.3% to 29.7% of the population). In this paper, we use synthetic panels to show that, despite progress, the region remains characterized by substantial vulnerability that also affects the rising middle-class. More...

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...

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 paper examines the allocation of resources of poverty rates within households in Suriname. To this end we employ a bargaining model estimation framework that allows one to identify the allocation of resources across adult and children males and females. Our results using the Suriname...