We examine the long-term impacts of drought on local labor markets in Brazil. Using rainfall data going back over a century, we build contemporaneous and historical drought indices for more than 3,000 local areas, and examine them in conjunction with five waves of population census data spanning...

This paper shows that returns to education are not enough to capture all the returns to human capital. Using longitudinal data of all college graduates in Colombia, we estimate labor market returns to postsecondary degrees and to various skills— including literacy, numeracy, foreign language,...

This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. To ground our welfare analysis, we develop a heterogeneous agent general...

Grade retention and early dropout are two of the biggest challenges facing education systems in middle-income countries today, representing waste in school resources. We investigate whether reducing parent-school information gaps can improve outcomes that are early-warning signals for grade...

This paper shows that returns to education are not enough to capture all the returns to human capital. Using longitudinal data of all college graduates in Colombia, we estimate labor market returns to postsecondary degrees and to various skillsincluding literacy, numeracy, foreign language,...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of an intervention aimed at improving the reading skills of struggling third-grade students in Colombia. In a series of randomized experiments, students participated in remedial tutorials conducted during school hours in small groups. Trained teachers used...