We study the determinants of math achievement among children in early elementary school using data from a unique experiment in which children were randomly assigned to classrooms within schools for four consecutive grades. As a result, each child in our sample was exposed to four separate, orthogonal shocks to the quality of teachers and peers. We first show that there are steep socioeconomic gradients and a substantial boy-girl gap in math test scores. However, among children of mothers with university education, there is no difference in the math achievement of girls and boys.

Following the seminal work of Deaton (1985), pseudo-panels (or synthetic panel) analysis has been widely used in the context of consumption and income (e.g. Deaton and Paxson, 1994; Banks, Blundell, and Brugiavini, 2001; Pencavel, 2007). In Latin America, the synthetic panel approach has been used primarily to examine income mobility (e.g. Calónico, 2006; Navarro, 2006; Ñopo, 2011; Ferreira et al., 2013).

This paper provides new evidence to characterize changes in the demand for skills associated with shifts in occupations for a sample of 10 of the G20 countries, using information available from LinkedIn profiles as a new and unique source of dynamic labor market data on occupations and skills. A unique feature of LinkedIn’s data is the availability of granular measures of skill importance by country and occupation.

We use a field experiment to evaluate the impact of two informational get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns to boost female electoral participation in Paraguay. We find that public campaigns had no effect either on the probability of registration, or on voter turnout in the 2013 presidential election. However, households that received door-to-door (D2D) treatment were four percentage points more likely to vote.

El Salvador has made significant advances in education in the last decade, with more and more children going to school. But many drop out young, and those who stay in school often receive an inconsistent and inadequate education. Greater and better investment is needed to tackle both of these challenges.

Education spending has significantly increased in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) over the last few decades. Most education systems in the region have improved teacher salaries, introduced programs that focus on improving learning in the most disadvantaged schools and systemic accountability. The available data suggests that increased spending combined with economic and social reforms has had an impact on educational outcomes such as improvement on primary and secondary completion rate and moderate but sustained progress in closing the learning gap with more developed countries.

With the aim of contributing to the design of evidence-based public health policies in Latin America and the Caribbean and giving special consideration to patient or health service user perspectives, between 2012 and 2014 the Inter-American Development Bank carried out the Primary Care Access, Experience and Coordination Survey in Latin America and the Caribbean, in adult populations in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, El Salvador, Panama and Jamaica.

Uruguay is one of very few countries in Latin America that has a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of early childhood development. In 2015–2016, during the second wave of the survey, an observational module on the home environment was administered at scale for the first time. The module included items from two subscales (responsiveness and acceptance) of a widely used instrument that measures the quality of the physical and emotional environment: the HOME inventory.

This document contains the appendices to "Is Results-Based Aid More Effective than Conventional Aid? Evidence from the Health Sector in El Salvador".

Results-based aid (RBA) models link funds to outcomes, rather than paying for inputs. Despite their theoretical appeal and recent adoption by donors and multilateral development banks, there is limited empirical evidence supporting this form of aid for national governments. We estimate the effects of a RBA model using a natural experiment in El Salvador, where the same community health intervention was implemented in 98 municipalities using one of three financing models.