School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of makingschools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decisionmakingby local schools. This paper shows that across eight Latin-American countries, most ofthe variation in local...

School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of making schools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decision making by local schools. This article shows that across eight Latin American countries, most of the variation in...

Child labor's effect on academic achievement is estimated using unique data on third and fourth graders in nine Latin-American countries. Cross-country variation in truancy regulations provides an exogenous shift in the ages of children normally in these grades, providing exogenous variation in...