This article examines the long-term consequences of a historical human capital intervention. The Jesuit order founded religious missions in 1609 among the Guarani, in modern-day Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. Before their expulsion in 1767, missionaries instructed indigenous inhabitants in...

This paper studies the unintended long-run effects of a permanent agricultural shock led by agro-terrorism in Brazil on the education and labour market. We explore the witches' broom outbreak in cocoa farms in the world's second most important cocoa production region until 1989, the southeast of...

In 2006, the Bolivian government introduced a large-scale cash transfer programme, Bono Juancito Pinto (BJP). Exploiting the exogenous variation of the programme expansion, this paper examines the impact of BJP on schooling and child labour. The analysis suggests that the transfer increases the...

The economic literature has shown that exogenous transitory shocks affect education by changing the opportunity cost of children. We argue that this is only part of the explanation. When permanent, shocks may change contracts and the organization of labour by eroding the productive structure and...

We conducted an experiment in low-income schools in Chile to test the effects and behavioral changes triggered by a program that sends attendance, grade, and classroom behavior information to parents via weekly and monthly text messages. Our 18-month intervention raised average math GPA by 0.09...

This paper presents compelling anecdotal evidence from two cohorts of graduate students introduced to spatial reasoning through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Outcomes of a case-study assigned in prior cohorts showed marked improvement in depth of understanding of three key...

States are increasingly mandating financial literacy education as a high school graduation requirement. However, most states already include economics education as part of their curriculum, and it is unclear whether financial literacy education and economics education differ. We examine the...