States' governance of gender is not unidirectional. In addition to 'stagnation' and 'progress', there can be an active reversal of rights already granted to women. Using the case of abortion rights in El Salvador, this paper investigates the following questions: What are the likely causes of...

This paper combines cross-national statistical analysis and in-depth historical case studies of Argentina and Chile to explore the relationship between two crucial dimensions of state capacity. We show that information capacity contributes to the development of fiscal capacity. States require...

We argue that tax revenues and political institutions placing constraints on the executive power may reinforce each other over time and so co-evolve in the long run. This may also bring a shift in the composition of revenues, from taxes levied on a narrow base to broadly levied taxes. To test...

How do civil war dynamics affect state-building decisions in the aftermath of conflict? This paper argues that, in the post-conflict period, the state focuses its efforts to build state capacity on areas in which state power has been eroded during wartime, with the goal of avoiding future...

This paper presents new evidence on the study of income mobility in Ecuador over the period 2004 - 11. We utilize longitudinal data of individual income tax returns to measure income mobility both at the top and at the middle of the income distribution, and we find three main empirical results....

Latin America has seen vast improvements in gender educational and health equality. Favourable supply-side conditions, however, have not translated into greater gender economic equality, a process that also depends on structural economic change and global macroeconomic conditions. In this paper,...

In this paper we use different sources of data on job task content to investigate the importance of occupations and the intensity of routine tasks embodied in them in explaining changes in employment and earnings in Brazil, in particular their relation with earnings and polarization, and...

Voter coercion is a recurrent threat to pro-poor redistribution in young democracies. In this study we focus on Mexico's paradigmatic Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. We investigate whether local mayors exploited POP to coerce voters, and if so, what effect these actions had on...

This paper studies the incidence and heterogeneity of labour informality in six Latin American countries-Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru. We divide workers into five work statuses: formal wage-employed, formal self-employed, upper-tier informal wageemployed, lower-tier...

Using height as a proxy for physical productivity of labour, this paper estimates the selection of Mexican migration to the United States at the beginning of the flow (1906-08), and it exploits a natural experiment of history to evaluate the impact of random shocks on short-run shifts in...