This paper provides a summary of the findings contained in a forthcoming issue of the Latin American Journal of Economics on entrepreneurship in Latin America as a vehicle for upward social mobility, especially for the middle class. The income persistence coefficients estimated with pseudo-panel...

This paper makes use of the 2006 Gallup World Survey, which includes opinions on satisfaction with various aspects of life in 130 countries. Although a very solid relationship is found between satisfaction and income (both across and within countries), raising doubts regarding the well-known...

Panel data for seven Latin American countries are used to assess the influence of public indebtedness on public investment in infrastructure in the period 1987-2001. Debt increases are associated with higher public infrastructure investment, an effect that is robust to the inclusion of many...

A growing number of cities around the world have established systems of monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective and subjective information and attempt to cover a wide variety of topics. This paper introduces a simple method that takes advantage of both types...

This paper makes use of the 2006 Gallup World Survey, which includes opinions on satisfaction with various aspects of life in 130 countries. Although a very solid relationship is found between satisfaction and income (both across and within countries), raising doubts regarding the well-known...

Panel data for seven Latin American countries are used to assess the influence of public indebtedness on public investment in infrastructure in the period 1987-2001. Debt increases are associated with higher public infrastructure investment, an effect that is robust to the inclusion of many...