What motivates kidnapping decisions by rebel groups? This paper studies news coverage of a proposed prisoner exchange program (the Acuerdo Humanitario; AH) in connection with FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) kidnappings in the early 2000s. We propose that AH News nourished the...

How does violence affect social capital? I argue that its impact depends on two factors: i) the ability to identify the perpetrating group, and ii) the intensity of the violence. These factors help to reconcile the seemingly contradictory effects of violence on social capital presented in the...

In the early 2000s, the Colombian government aired messages during games of the national football team, urging FARC rebels to demobilize. We first study the strategy's effectiveness, leveraging game dates, kick-off times, and spatial-temporal variation in rain-induced signal strength in a...

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...

The role of the agricultural sector during the ISI period and the debate about the agricultural wage and the living conditions of the farm workers have a long historiography. But until today there is little information about workers' income in the long run. In this paper we want to reflect about...

Tax policy is among the most common and relevant instruments in the toolkit of policy-makers when thinking about promoting growth, yet there is not compelling evidence regarding its effect in Latin American countries. Using a variety of approaches, we estimate the effects on growth of the most...

Since the end of World War II, Argentina has been through an uninterrupted series of financial/fiscal and monetary crises that have gradually eroded the credibilityof the economic institutions of the country. In the period from 1970 to 1990 alone, the Argentine economy experienced seven currency...

This paper aims to analyze, from a legal perspective, the public policies of Science, Technology and Innovation offered by the Brazilian government, more specifically, the Innovation Act (Lei de Inovação), in order to verify the effectiveness and impact of this measure for development, in the...

This paper examines how the adoption of the Australian ballot (AB), and ipso facto, the transition from the nominal to effective secret vote, shaped the nature of party politics in Brazil. Engaging the literature on political clientelism, the impact of the AB on three outcomes is studied: 1) the...

The article presents an analysis of the relations between national state and human rights in Brazil between the years of 1968 and 1996. The purpose is to reconstruct the historical process of the incorporation of this theme as a state policy and to put into evidence the conditionings of the...