As the developed world has experienced a shift away from the traditional two-biological parent family, scholars have sought to understand how children are faring in non-traditional homes. Debate has arisen over assertions that children from non-traditional families do less well in school....

In this paper we use household survey data to study the determinants of children’s educational achievement in Uruguay. As an indicator of this educational achievement, we build the “educational gap” which is the difference between expected years of schooling of a child and actual years of...

Most discussion of after-school programs in shanty towns has focused on estimating their average effects. The results of these programs are inconclusive and the explanation may be that the effects are heterogeneous. In this paper, we study the influence of how heterogeneity in the type of...

The happiness literature provides evidence on various factors, other than money, that do seem to contribute to individual happiness. As one explores the produced “happiness socioeconomics” literature, it is direct to understand the difficulty to find proper information on developing...

Every day in the pages of national newspapers and television news, we may read and hear about acts of violence that are based upon children and adolescents as victims or as perpetrators. While Press coverage on social issues is extensive, daily events are not fully reflected in the media....

Using a randomized trial, we evaluate the impact of a free privately-managed middle school in a poor neighborhood. The research compares over time adolescents randomly selected to enter Liceo-Jubilar and those that were not drawn in the lottery. Besides positive impacts on expectations, we find...

Although participation rates in the educational system might look impressive for a Latin American country, educational outputs are not that great. Uruguay is characterized by educational gaps and high drop-out rates in the secondary education. In our work we first explore the returns to...

We evaluate the impact of joint-liability incentives in the classroom using a randomized field experiment. The instructor design groups of three students in the classroom and provides a premium to their homework's grade only if all three members of the group accomplish some requirements. To...

It is usual to formulate policies that react on the consequences, not the causes of family structure. In the design of policies, it is important to consider that institutions evolve in response to individual incentives and affect the performance of political and economic systems. Formal rules...

The happiness literature provides evidence on various factors, other than money, that do seem to contribute to individual happiness. As one explores the produced “happiness economics” literature, it is direct to understand the difficulty to find proper information on developing countries...