In this paper we use micro-data from income and expenditure surveys for seven Latin American countries. We estimate Engel equations and present stylized facts regarding cultural spending. Culture activities are a key indicator of a society development and therefore cultural spending decisions...

In this paper we provide estimates of the coefficient of relative risk aversion for 80 countries using data on self-reports of personal well-being from the Gallup World Poll. For most countries we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the coefficient of relative risk aversion equals 1. We...

This paper follows two strategies to address whether the rich save more. First, the paper implements a two-stage procedure in which the household's lifetime income is instrumented with the education level of the household head and the education level of his/her partner. Second, using information...

This paper reports the results of a three-month randomized controlled trial to estimate the impact of an Internet and mobile telephone short message service (SMS) intervention on adolescents information about substances and rates of consumption. A low percentage of participants logged on to the...

This paper characterizes household spending in education using microdata from income and expenditure surveys for twelve Latin American and Caribbean countries and the United States. Bahamas, Chile, and Mexico have the highest household spending in education and Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay have...

We employ unconditional quantile-decomposition methods to analyze the gender wage gap (GWG) in the urban region of twelve Latin American countries. Using data from harmonized household surveys we decompose the GWG into an explained component (differences in human capital) and an unexplained...

Human capital investment may be affected by programs aimed at giving legal ownership titles to the occupants of land; these are called "land titling programs". Titling is associated with an income (or wealth) effect as it induces higher expenditure on normal goods like home consumption, education...

Using data on a trust game played in six Latin American cities we estimate the relationship between religious participation with trust and reciprocity. We find no association with trust but we do find a statistically significant relation with reciprocity. More religious people tend to...

En este artículo se describe la dinámica del empleo y del capital en la industria manufacturera uruguaya entre 1982 y 1995 a partir de estimar las tasas de creación, destrucción, creación neta y reasignación de los factores de producción usando la muestra de establecimientos de la...

We compute the Gini indexes for income, happiness and various simulated utility levels. Due to decreasing marginal utility of income, happiness inequality should be lower than income inequality. We find that happiness inequality is about half that of income inequality. To compute the utility...