This paper investigates the incentives that may induce workers to supplement income from unemployment benefits by engaging in temporary informal work. Using a dynamic model of job-search with moral hazard that incorporates a stylised schedule of benefit payments, we describe how informal sector...

This paper investigates the incentives that may induce workers to supplement income from unemployment benefits by engaging in temporary informal work. Using a dynamic model of job-search with moral hazard that incorporates a stylised schedule of benefit payments, we describe how informal sector...

This paper explores the characteristics of both optimal and actual unemployment insurance and employment protection. It then sketches potential paths for reforms in both rich and middle-income countries. It reaches three main conclusions: There is a role for both state-provided unemployment...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy hold to a pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, suggesting it will be hard for modern social policy to create a more egalitarian society. This paper argues...

This report details the divergent paths that the world economy may take and their potential effects on Latin America and the Caribbean. Scenarios are constructed employing a modeling exercise that captures the trade, financial and other linkages between the region and the rest of the world....

The purpose of this paper is to set the issue of Chinese investment in Southeast Asia in two contexts: the changing geography of economic growth and patterns of trade and investment across the world as a whole, and the accompanying quiet revolution that has taken place in the international...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

Studying the modern economic histories of the ten largest countries in South America and Mexico teaches us the lack of fiscal discipline has been at the root of most of the region's macroeconomic instability. The lack of fiscal discipline, however, takes various forms not measured in the primary...

This paper exploits the variation in the timing of electoral law enforcement across nine Latin American countries to consistently examine the contribution of de jure and de facto political institutions to long-run development. The set of novel measures of electoral law enforcement is constructed...