Workfare has become a central policy in Argentina since mid-2002, when the government increased the number of beneficiaries from 100,000 to two million people in a country of thirty-nine million. In ...this paper I assess the focalization of the program and estimate its income effects using individual panel data for the period 2000–02. In addition to standard nearest-neighbor matching estimators, I compute difference-in-differences estimators and allow for nonpositive income effects. I find that only 55 percent of the participants were in the poorest quintile of the income per capita distribution. The estimated average income effect of the program during participation was about one-third of the average benefit handed out by the program. While there is some evidence that the program had a higher benefit for the poor, for a large number of relatively wealthier individuals the program did not make a big difference. These results appear to be driven, at least partly, by weak enforcement of work requirements and eligibility conditions. These findings question the efficacy of this program as an effective tool for addressing poverty.
This paper provides, to our knowledge for the first time, cross-country measures of
enforcement of labor law across almost every country in the world. The distinction between de
jure and de facto ...regulation is well understood in theory, but almost never implemented in crosscountry
empirical work because of lack of data. As a result, influential papers like the one by
Botero et. al. (2004) published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which have shaped the
policy debate by finding strong negative consequences of labor regulation on labor market
outcomes, are based entirely on measures of de jure stringency of regulations. We show that this
neglect of regulation enforcement matters. There is, on average, a negative correlation between
the stringency of labor regulation and the intensity of its enforcement. The strong results of
Botero et. al. (2004) on the consequences of labor regulation, and the hypotheses of La Porta et.
al (2008) on the legal origin theory of regulation stringency, no longer hold for effective labor
regulation.
Discrimination in Latin America Hugo Nopo, Alberto Chong, Andrea Moro
2010, 2009, 12-03-2009, 20100101, 2011-12-09 00:00:00
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
Latin America has often been regarded as a region with deep ethnic and class conflicts. The difficulty of assessing this from an economic perspective is two fold: There is little solid, unbiased, and ...systematic data to provide convincing empirical evidence, and there is a dearth of empirical methods to identify specific discriminatory-based behavior as opposed to related behavior that might only appear to be discriminatory.This book uses a variety of methodological tools -- regression analysis, market tests, field experiments, audit studies, and structural methods -- to explore the extent to which discrimination against women and demographic minorities is pervasive in Latin America.
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