This book uses micro-level data for 18 Latin American countries to examine the choices adolescents make in three areas of behavior: their time allocation toward school and work, their sexual behavior and fertility, and their adoption of adult roles as they marry or cohabitate. Analyzing these...

Common sense suggests that healthier people are more productive and wealthier people can obtain things that make them healthier. This book asks whether investments in health also affect productivity and how public policy can influence this relationship. These questions are probed through a...

A growing number of cities around the world have established systems for monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective information with subjective opinions and cover a wide variety of topics. This book assesses a method that takes advantage of both types of...

This book examines poverty as a structural problem caused by the way economic systems operate. It poses a simple question: Why do poor people earn less? Case studies in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Peru find the poor caught in a vicious circle. They lack sufficient access to...

This paper assesses the effects of the Colombian Unemployment Subsidy (US), which includes benefits as well as training for some recipients. Using regression discontinuity and matching differences-in-differences estimators, the study finds that participation in the labor market, earnings of...

El presente estudio se concentra en analizar los principales activos que no poseen o poseen en forma deficiente los pobres en Colombia y que son la causa que explica en buena medida la pobreza. Nos referimos a un conjunto diverso de activos que hemos agrupado en cuatro grandes categorías:...

The authors present matching estimators of the impact on earnings for individuals who attended public and private job training programs in Colombia. They estimate propensity scores by controlling for the variety of personal and socioeconomic background variables of those individuals. The effect...

El presente estudio se concentra en analizar los principales activos que no poseen o poseen en forma deficiente los pobres en Colombia y que son la causa que explica en buena medida la pobreza. Nos referimos a un conjunto diverso de activos que hemos agrupado en cuatro grandes categorías:...

This paper surveys the evolution and implications of fiscal decentralization in Colombia in recent decades. After describing the fiscal decentralization process and its impact on sub-national finances, the paper presents the evolution of departmental public finances, departmental vertical...

The present paper explores the relationship between political competition and effective public goods delivery systems in a decentralized context to study whether the awareness generated through such a competitive environment and the existence of more political options are a part of the causal...