This document presents a discussion of vulnerability estimates – defined as the risk of being poor in the future – in Latin American countries from both a conceptual and an empirical perspective, based on recent developments in the distributive literature. The document develops two main...

Minimum wage compliance is studied by counting how many workers are paid below this floor. While useful, it is unable to identify the degree of underpayment. Recently, a family of violation indices has overcome this issue. I estimate these measures for Honduras, a dual labor market with multiple...

This paper shows that the combination of habit formation - present consumption creating additional consumption needs in the future - and myopia may explain why some retirees are forced to "unretire", i.e., unexpectedly return to work. It also shows that when myopia about habit formation leads to...

We model the decisions of young individuals to stay in school or drop-out and engage in criminal activities. We build on the literature on human capital and crime engagement and use the framework of Banerjee (1993) that assumes that the information needed to engage in crime arrives in the form...