To contribute to the debate about decentralization of education management, in this paper, we take advantage of the arbitrary rule used in Colombia to define the municipalities that can autonomously manage schools, to evaluate through a Regression Discontinuity methodology the effect of municipal’s autonomy on student achievement and teacher characteristics, using as a counterfactual schools located in municipalities that just missed the population criteria, schools that are managed by the departments.

This paper evaluates the impacts of a public program that introduced access to part-time childcare centers for children younger than four years of age in poor urban areas in Nicaragua. We explore the effects of this program on several measures of children's and parental outcomes. Our identification strategy exploits the original randomization and the distance to the centers, using Instrumental Variables (IV) and Marginal Treatment Effects (MTE) methods to tackle imperfect compliance with the original treatment assignments. We present a theoretical model to rationalize our IV assumptions.

This paper evaluates the impact of the Bono Trabajador Activo, a training voucher program in Chile, on workers' labor market outcomes. Using detailed administrative datasets of the National Employment Service and the Unemployment Insurance System, we apply difference-in-difference and IV estimators to measure these effects. Our main results indicate that the voucher program has an overall negative impact on employment and earnings, particularly among individuals who expect to change economic sector.

This issue of IDEA explores the workings of democratic institutions in Latin America and how they shape economic and other policies. It analyzes the roles, incentives, capabilities and interaction of key political players: the legislature, business, organized labor and the media.  Based on a recent IDB book, How Democracy Works: Political Institutions, Actors, and Arenas in Latin American Policymaking, the newsletter provides a taste of the multiple, complex actors at work on the region¿s policymaking stage.

As home visiting programs continue to expand, it is crucial to develop cost-effective methods to monitor their quality that are feasible at-scale. This paper compares two instruments widely used among home visiting services in the US to a simpler checklist in the context of Peru’s Cuna Mas Program. The paper aims to document the structure, content and level of process quality of the Cuna Mas home visits.

That four- and five-year-olds can do algebra, arithmetic, and geometry may be hard to believe. But if you visit a preschool classroom in the Cordillera region of Paraguay, you will see children who learn factoring by organizing balls and sticks into groups, and who work together to form pentagons and hexagons with their bodies. These children are participating in a project called "Tikichuela, Mathematics in My School", the result of a partnership between the Japanese and Paraguayan governments, the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI), and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Credit constraints are central to development economics theory. However, there is scant direct evidence that supports the existence of such constraints. Traditional tests observe how consumption changes after an unexpected income shock. Such changes can also result from myopic behavior or precautionary savings. This study uses a randomized control trial to explore the effects of enabling savings as a tool to smooth consumption, keeping income constant. The study focuses on community instructors in Mexico.

This paper presents an impact evaluation of a revamped version of the Dominican youth training program Juventud y Empleo. The paper analyzes the impact of the program on traditional labor market outcomes and on outcomes related to youth behavior and life style, expectations about the future and socio-emotional skills. In terms of labor market outcomes, the program has a positive impact on job formality for men of about 17 percent and there is also a seven percent increase in monthly earnings among those employed. However, there are no overall impacts on employment rates.

Teenage pregnancy in the Dominican Republic represents a persistent development challenge. This paper uses data from a randomized impact evaluation of the youth training program Juventud y Empleo, which includes soft-skills training, to examine its impact on teenage pregnancy. We find that the program reduces the probability of teenage pregnancy by 8 percentage points (about 20 percent), particularly among teenagers who are not already mothers. The program seems to affect teenage pregnancy through improvements in soft skills and expectations, among others channels.