Research

We document employment preferences of workers at the margin of informality using open-ended questions and discrete choice experiments in Brazil's largest favela complex. Stated preferences emphasize pay and tangible job attributes rather than meaning or purpose. Stated complaints center on management, customers, and inflexible schedules. Workers exhibit high willingness to pay for unemployment insurance, parental leave, and learning opportunities, but none for termination notice or shorter commutes. We find larger willingness to accept to forgo amenities than willingness to pay to obtain them, consistent with preference-based sorting or endowment effects.

This paper studies school choice and information frictions in Haiti. Through a randomized control trial, we assess the impact of disclosing school-level test score information on learning outcomes, prices, and market shares. We find evidence that in markets where information was disclosed, students attending private schools increased test scores. The results also suggest private schools with higher baseline test scores increased their market share as well as their fees when the disclosure policy is implemented. While prices and test scores were not significantly correlated in the baseline survey, they exhibited a significant and positive correlation in treatment markets after information disclosure. These results underscore the potential of information provision to enhance market efficiency and improve children’s welfare in context such as Haiti.

Globally, preschool enrollment has surged, but its quality is often poor. We evaluate strategies to improve quality of public preschools in Colombia. The first, designed by the government and rolled out nationwide, provided extra funding, mainly earmarked for hiring teaching assistants. The second also offered low-cost training for existing teachers. The first intervention had no effect on child development, while the second improved children’s cognitive development, especially for more disadvantaged children. This pattern can be explained by the interventions affecting teachers' behavior differently. The first led teachers to reduce their classroom time, including learning activities, while additional training offset the adverse effect on learning activities and improved teaching quality.

We study the welfare and human capital impacts of colleges’ (non)participation in Chile’s centralized higher-education platform, leveraging administrative data and two policy changes: the introduction of a large scholarship program and the inclusion of additional institutions, which raised the number of on-platform slots by approximately 40%. We first show that the expansion of the platform raised on-time graduation rates. We then develop and estimate a model of college applications, offers, wait lists, matriculation, and graduation. When the platform expands, welfare increases, and welfare, enrollment, and graduation rates are less sensitive to off-platform frictions. Gains are larger for students from lower-socioeconomic-status backgrounds.

On the basis of a randomized controlled trial, we evaluate a scholarship program in Mexico, Programa de Becas Educación Media Superior (PROBEMS), aimed at improving graduation rates and test scores among upper secondary school students from poor backgrounds. We find that, on average, the program has no effect on either graduation rates or math and Spanish test scores. We point to two possible reasons for this failure: (i) the program was badly targeted, with many of the recipients being from less disadvantaged families than intended; and (ii) the prior academic achievement of those eligible was often insufficient for successful completion of the academic requirements of upper secondary school. This points to accumulated achievement deficits that could be addressed by interventions targeting learning at an earlier stage.

A currency’s essential feature is to be a medium of exchange. This study explores the potential of cryptocurrencies to be used in daily transactions in El Salvador, the first country to make bitcoin legal tender. The government’s “big push” introduced “Chivo Wallet,” a digital wallet sharing features with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), with perks to use it for trading bitcoins and US dollars. Through a nationally representative, face-to-face survey of 1800 households and blockchain data encompassing all Chivo Wallet transactions, we document a pattern of low and decreasing usage of digital payments and bitcoin. Privacy and security concerns are key adoption barriers, which speaks to a policy debate on crypto and CBDCs with anonymity at its core. Additionally, we estimate Chivo Wallet’s adoption cost and complementarities among adopters.

This paper studies the role of private sector companies in the development of local amenities. We use evidence from one of the largest multinationals of the 20th century: the United Fruit Company (UFCo). The firm was given a large land concession in Costa Rica—one of the so‐called “Banana Republics”—from 1899 to 1984. Using administrative census data with census‐block geo‐references from 1973 to 2011, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity design that exploits a land assignment that is orthogonal to our outcomes of interest. We find that the firm had a positive and persistent effect on living standards. Company documents explain that a key concern at the time was to attract and maintain a sizable workforce, which induced the firm to invest heavily in local amenities—like the development of education and health infrastructure—that can account for our result. Consistent with this mechanism, we show, empirically and through a proposed model, that the firm's investment efforts increase with worker mobility.