The present work assesses the effectiveness of educational grants at raising schooling attainment of poor children in rural areas. The per grade gains in reducing drop outs cumulate in an additional half a year in total schooling. Progressive impacts are found along three dimensions: degree of...

Cash transfers can help poor families to meet the costs associated with sending their children to school. Demand constraints are a major impediment to schooling attainment in rural areas. Educational grants can contribute to raise schooling attainment in rural areas and thereby to close the gap...

Knowing whether a household behaves according to separability or non-separability is needed for the correct modeling of production decisions. We propose a superior test to those found in the literature on separability by using a mixture distribution approach to estimate the probability that a...

Farmers incur proportional and fixed transactions costs in selling their crops on markets. Using data for Peruvian potato farmers, we propose a method to measure these transactions costs. When opportunities exist to sell a crop on alternative markets, the observed choice of market can be used to...

Explaining land use change in Mexico requires understanding the behavior of the local institutions involved. We develop two theories to explain deforestation in communities with and without forestry projects, where the former involves a process of side payments to non-members of the community...

We study the effects of a conditional transfers program on school enrollment and performance in Mexico. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the dynamic educational decision and process including the endogeneity and uncertainty of performance (passing grades) and the effect of a...