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....

Most discussion of after-school programs in shantytowns has centered on estimating mean impacts of programs, and results are not conclusive. Previous literature provides some explanations for these mixed results but this paper provides a new channel: the effectiveness of an after-school program...

A growing strand of economic literature focuses its attention on the relationship between happiness levels and various individual and socioeconomic variables. Recent studies analyze the impact of income, marital status, health, educational levels and other socioeconomic variables on satisfaction...

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...

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...

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...

Research in the U.S. and much of the developed world suggests that children in intact, two-parent households typically do better on educational outcomes than do children in single-parent and step-family households. While studies in the developed world generally indicate that family structure...

Using a randomized trial, we evaluate the impact of one of the few free privately-managed middle schools in Uruguay: Liceo Jubilar. The research exploits the excess of applicants over the school’s capacity and the fact that participants are selected randomly. The study tracks and compares over...

We use a rich data set that allows us to test different happiness hypotheses employing four methodological approaches. We find that older people in Uruguay have a tendency to report themselves happy when they are married, when they have higher standards of health and when they earn higher levels...