About half of Latin America’s youth are considered"at risk,"meaning that they engage in or are at risk of engaging in risky behaviors that are detrimental to their own development and to the well-being of their societies. While child psychologists identify many factors that may cause some...

A new literature on the nature of and policies for youth in Latin America is emerging, but there is still very little known about who are the most vulnerable young people. This paper aims to characterize the heterogeneity in the youth population and identify ex ante the youth that are at-risk...

High youth unemployment rates may be a signal of difficult labor market entry for youth or may reflect high churning. The European and United States literature finds the latter conclusion while the Latin American literature suggests the former. This paper uses panel data to examine whether Latin...

This study constructs three indices to measure how well Brazil's young people are surviving their transition to adulthood. Youth development is difficult to quantify because of the multi-dimensionality of youth behavior. Most monitoring use individual indicators in specific sectors, making it...

Using panel data from labor force surveys in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, the paper maps out young people's paths from the classroom to the work place during the 1980s through the early 2000s. By decomposing transition matrices into propensity to move and rate of separation and estimating...

Using data collected in rural Burkina Faso, this paper examines how children's cognitive abilities influence households'decisions to invest in their education. To address the endogeneity of child ability measures, the analysis uses rainfall shocks experienced in utero or early childhood to...

Using data they collected in rural Burkina Faso, the authors examine how children's cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households'decisions to invest in their education. This paper uses a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current...