Working paper
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Nudging microentrepreneurs under fire: Experimental evidence from favelas in Rio de Janeiro
Do behavioral biases and the distortions generated by the presence of organized crime limit microentrepreneurs’ adoption of growth-oriented business practices? We explore this question in a field experiment with informal microentrepreneurs in which we provide informational visits and text messages about the advantages and convenience of a formalization program. All microentrepreneurs operated in Complexo Maré, […]
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Soap operas and pro-savings attitudes in poor rural areas of Peru.
We wrote, produced, and implemented a randomized intervention of a five-episode soap opera focusing on attitudes related to trust and savings. It was shown to females living in poor and violence-scarred rural areas and who received the national conditional cash transfer. We find that one year after the intervention treated females significantly improve their attitudes […]
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Edutainment, savings and dwelling-related assets in poor rural areas of Peru
We exploit a field experiment by Chong and Valdivia (2023) and test whether por women from rural areas in developing countries that are able to save seek dwellingrelated assets and find causal evidence that this is indeed the case. Furthermore, we also find that the older cohort of women, those aged forty and higher, also […]
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Barreras para la integración laboral de migrantes venezolanos en el Perú: identificación y análisis de opciones de política
The Venezuelan migrant population presents higher levels of unemployment and labour precariousness (e.g. labour informality, lower income) than their national peers. Available literature and interviews with experts suggest that there are multiple factors or barriers at the root of this problem, which can be classified into the following groups: migration regularisation, legal, social and labour […]
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Educational pathways: young Peruvians in the COVID-19 pandemic
Young people have suffered most from the economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America. The the pandemic constituted a highly complex scenario in which emergency remote and virtual education emerged as a useful, though not perfect, tool. This paper presents findings from the second instalment of a telephone follow-up study conducted […]
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Reforming education in the context of weak states: the political economy of education reforms in Peru 1995-2020
In this paper, we explore the political economy of education reforms in Peru through an analysis of the recent history of education policies in the country. Starting in 1995, arguably the inception point for quality-oriented reforms, we follow policy developments in three selected areas – curriculum, teachers and assessment – up to 2020, the year […]
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Medidas de protección social del gobierno peruano en época de la Covid-19
In the current context, where the pandemic still persists, but whose health impacts are reduced by the increasing application of vaccines, it is important to analyze what the State has done to protect the population, especially children and adolescents, from poverty. This analysis makes it possible to assess the effectiveness and relevance of the State’s […]
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How early nutrition and foundational cognitive skills interconnect? Evidence from two developing countries
We use unique data collected in Ethiopia and Peru as part of the Young Lives Study to investigate the relationship between early undernutrition and four foundational cognitive skills, the first two of which measure executive functioning: working memory, inhibitory control, long-term memory, and implicit learning. We exploit the rich longitudinal data available to control for […]
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How early nutrition and foundational cognitive skills interconnect? Evidence from two developing countries
While the long-term consequences of early stunting on educational attainment and on school achievement tests are well-known, there is scarce evidence about the specific mechanisms through which early stunting leads to poorer educational outcomes, especially in LMIC contexts. We use unique data collected in Ethiopia and Peru as part of the Young Lives to investigate […]
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Employment protection legislation and on-the-job training in an informal labor market: evidence from Peru
Training and learning on the job are two critical channels for human capital accumulation during work years. Several studies in developed countries have found that fixed-term contract (FTC) workers receive less training sponsored by their employers than openended contract (OEC) workers do. In contrast, FTC workers participate more actively in informal learning during their job […]





