Income inequality has been rising in many developing countries since the 1980s. At the same time, global income inequality has been roughly stable (or even falling slightly) and there is great heterogeneity in within-country inequality trends across countries and regions. Non-income inequality...

The dissertation at hand is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 presents an impact evaluation of a widely spread conditional cash transfer in Brazil called Bolsa Família. We analyze the impacts of the program on two educational outcomes: enrollment and attendance. In our analysis we consider...

Latin American countries have lost competitiveness in world markets in comparison to China over the last two decades. The main purpose of this study is to examine the causes of this development. To this end an augmented Dornbusch-type Ricardianʺ model is estimated using panel data. The...

The purpose of this dissertation is to address policy makers to change the way they think about increasing obesity rates. So far the discussion revolves around increasing incomes and imposing taxes on high fat food, despite their disputed effectiveness. Most of these studies seem to neglect the...