Publications

Publications

  • Childhood, transitions and well-being in Peru: A literature review

    2009 Patricia Ames, Vanessa Rojas

    This brief report provides a broad context for the Young Lives research being done in Peru by reviewing the academic literature, research findings, statistics and official documents available. It was carried out by the Young Lives qualitative researchers, and thus privileges the main areas to be explored by qualitative research in its first two rounds […]

  • Starting school: Who is prepared? Young Lives’ research on children’s transition to first grade in Peru

    2009 Patricia Ames, Vanessa Rojas, Tamia Portugal

    In recent years, a growing body of literature has pointed to the importance of children’s experiences of pre-school and Grade 1 as foundational for success during the subsequent school years. However, most of this research has been carried out in industrialised countries and has paid little attention to developing countries. This paper therefore seeks to […]

  • Gender Wage Gaps in Central American Countries: Evidence from a Non-Parametric Approach

    2009 Ted Enamorado, Ana Carolina Izaguirre, Hugo Ñopo

    The authors compares gender wage gaps for Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s using the non-parametric matching methodology introduced by Ñopo (2008), which allows an analysis not only of average gaps but also their distributions. While a simple comparison of average wages would suggest small or even negative […]

  • La formación de los economistas en América Latina

    2009 Eduardo Lora, Hugo Ñopo

    En el artículo se presenta una visión comparada de la formación de economistas en cinco países de América Latina. Para tal fin, se analizan la currícula, los libros de texto comúnmente utilizados, la dedicación de los profesores, los métodos de enseñanza, y el uso de tecnologías y herramientas computacionales. Así mismo, siguiendo el enfoque de […]

  • New Century, Old Disparities: Gender and Ethnic Wage Gaps in Latin America

    2009 Juan Pablo Atal, Hugo Ñopo, Natalia Winder

    The paper surveys gender and ethnic wage gaps in 18 Latin American countries, decomposing differences using matching comparisons as a non-parametric alternative to the Blinder-Oaxaca (BO) decomposition. It is found that men earn 9-27 percent more than women, with high cross-country heterogeneity. The unexplained pay gap is higher among older, informal and self-employed workers and […]

  • Happiness and Beliefs in Criminal Environments

    2009 Rafael Di Tella, Robert MacCulloch, Hugo Ñopo

    The paper uses newly available data to describe the distribution of crime victimization and other criminal activities (including drug trafficking and corruption) around the world. The paper then documents a negative (positive) correlation between measures of criminal activity and happiness and measures of positive (negative) emotions. The paper also studies the correlation between ideological beliefs […]

  • La Formación de los Economistas en America Latina

    2009 Eduardo Lora, Hugo Ñopo

    The paper presents a comparative view of the training of economists in Latin America, analyzing curricula, commonly utilized textbooks, professors’ time-commitments, teaching methods, and the use of technologies and computational tools. Also, following the approach of Colander (2005), the paper presents the results of a survey of Economics students, creating a socioeconomic profile of them […]

  • To What Extent Do Latin Americans Trust, Reciprocate, and Cooperate?: Evidence from Experiments in Six Latin American Countries

    2009 Juan Camilo Cárdenas, Alberto Chong, Hugo Ñopo

    The paper explores the extent to which individuals trust, reciprocate, cooperate, and pool risk. The authors use a battery of field experiments containing the trust game, the voluntary contribution mechanism, and the risk-pooling game, which we apply in six capital cities in Latin America. A salient feature of the paper is that the data is […]

  • Gender and Racial Wage Gaps in Brazil 1996-2006: Evidence Using a Matching Comparisons Approach

    2009 Luana Marquez Garcia, Hugo Ñopo, Paola Salardi

    The authors explores the evolution of Brazilian wage gaps by gender and skin color over a decade (1996-2006), using the matching comparison methodology developed by Ñopo (2008). In Brazil, racial wage gaps are more pronounced than those found along the gender divide, although both noticeably decreased over the course of the last decade. The decomposition […]