High delinquency rate of publicly provided mortgages in social housing programs are often interpreted to be due to moral hazard. In this paper we show that the typically used parametric approaches give misleading results due to overlooked confounding and selection biases. We show that by using...

Many public programs and operations by multilateral organisations include technical assistance to the direct beneficiaries of the program in addition to pure financing. However, there is no substantial body of studies that calculates the additional impact; in the sense of exclusively...

Durante la década de los noventa, los Fondos de Inversión Social fueron el mecanismo por excelencia para la entrega de obras sociales a poblaciones vulnerables en épocas de ajustes y crisis económicas. Desde entonces, los FIS se han convertido en instituciones con objetivos de más largo...

La economía venezolana se ha visto sometida desde mediados de la década de los setenta a un proceso de marcada inestabilidad y volatilidad, causado fundamentalmente por los shocks provenientes del mercado petrolero. La política fiscal ha jugado un rol determinante en la transmisión de esos...

El diagnóstico del sector Social en Honduras resalta que: (a) los niveles de pobreza son altos, especialmente en el sector rural donde el 60 por ciento de los hogares es pobre versus 54 por ciento en áreas urbanas (EPHPM 2010)-; (b) el grupo etario más vulnerable es el de los niños -40 por...

This evaluation examines the IDB's Country Program with Suriname for the 2007-2010 period. During this period, Suriname has been characterized by good economic performance largely due to prudent macroeconomic and debt management coupled with a world-wide commodity boom. Nonetheless, given data...

This evaluation examines the IDB's Country Program with Brazil for the 2007-2010 period. The evaluation found that the program with Brazil has been very relevant, because the IDB has been able to maintain its competitive advantage in the country by changing its business model in light of...

This policy brief reviews whether the size of a country limits economic growth. Diseconomies of scale, indivisible fixed costs and geographic barriers represent intrinsic characteristics of small economies that might hinder economic growth. However, while some small economies have overcome the...

It has become common wisdom amongst monetary policy professionals that central banks in Latin America should adopt inflation targeting. Pure inflation targeting implicitly assumes a social loss welfare function dependent on only inflation. In this paper using subjective well-being survey data...

This paper examines the association between trust and community involvement with fear of crime. Fear of crime is measured by three typical perception measures: neighborhood security; walking alone in the dark; and the risk of becoming a victim. The data is from Chile’s Victimization Survey....