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Research has consistently found that married women experienced less intimate partner violence (IPV) than cohabiting ones. However, most existing studies focus on the incidence of IPV as a binary indicator, while the severity of that exposure or the different types of violence has been largely ignored. This article begins to address these issues with a multivariate approach, for some Latin American countries. The study reports that married women suffered less violence than cohabiting women for each singular type of violence, even after controlling by education, age, locality, wealth, and personal violence history. This article proposes a novel mechanism that helps to explain these findings: marriage would provide a framework that fosters investment in the quality of the couple's relationship, thus preventing IPV. The estimates on the couple's investments support these predictions.

Parenting programs can improve experiences during the early years and generate long-term outcomes in variables such as employment, health, education, and salary. The need to scale up parenting programs has driven the implementation of interventions based on communication technologies and behavioral economics. This paper compares two impact evaluations of the Positive Parenting program in 2018 and a fully remote adaptation of the program in 2020. The evaluation of the first edition, which included an intensive face-to-face parenting workshop and emails, found significant increases in parental involvement and in the quality of child-caregiver interaction. The evaluation of the second edition of the program, which only included the sending of remote messages and was carried out in the context of the pandemic, does not find statistically significant effects, except in variables such as equal cooperation in parenting tasks within the household and socialization activities. The difference in results could be explained by the absence of an in-person workshop, the greater extension of the messages and the attention divided between multiple sources of stress and distractions observed during the second edition.

Optimism seems to foster the ability to manage adverse situations better-a finding especially relevant for disadvantaged populations. Employing a unique sample from a small underprivileged village, we studied the association between religious/spiritual practices and dispositional optimism. The village belongs to a developing country that is, by far, the most secular country in Latin America; this makes it particularly interesting for exploring the role of religious/spiritual practices in this context. We found that these practices were positively associated with higher optimism, measured by the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R): those who practice spirituality, score, on average, 14.4 percentage points higher on the LOT-R than those who did not. This association seems to be especially robust in the case of the poor and less educated: those with religious/spiritual practices score 20 percentage points higher on the LOT-R. Thus, the role that these practices may play in dispositional optimism in disadvantaged populations deserves more attention.

We assess the effects of theCrianza Positivatext and audio e-messaging program on caregiver–child language interaction patterns. The program is a six-month-long intervention for families with children aged 0–2 aimed at strengthening parental competences. Its design exploits behavioral tools such as reminders, suggestions of action, and messages of encouragement to reinforce and sustain positive parenting practices. Families in 24 early childhood centers in Uruguay that completed an eight-week workshop were randomized into receiving or not receiving mobile messages. After the program, we videotaped 10-minute sessions of free play between the caregiver and the child, and decoded language patterns using automated techniques. The intervention was successful at improving the quality of parental vocalizations, as measured by the parent's pitch range. We also found suggestive evidence of increases in the duration of adult vocalizations. The results are consistent with more frequent parental self-reported involvement in reading, telling stories, and describing things to the child. Regarding the child, we find a nonrobust decrease in the duration of vocalizations, which we attribute to a crowding-out effect by the caregiver in the context of a fixed 10-minute suggested activity and a more proactive parental role.

We study the impact of mandatory motorcycle helmet use laws on the severity and volume of road accidents in Uruguay by exploiting a change in the enforcement of the traffic law. Using a difference-in-differences design based on an unexpected change in policy, we report a sharp increase in helmet use and a five percentage point reduction in the incidence of serious or fatal motorcyclist accidents from a baseline of 11 percent. The benefits of helmet use are disproportionately borne by groups more likely to experience serious injuries, such as males or young drivers. We find no evidence of other responses in terms of either the volume or type of accident, suggesting that motorcyclists’ behavior did not respond to differences in risk. We show that additional costs of enforcement for the relevant government agencies were negligible and estimate the health benefits of the policy.

Much research has focused on the introduction of information and communication technology (ICTs) into the lives of older people, but it has generally understood them as external factors who...

We examined the prevalence of sexual abuse against women around the world and the protective factors that may prevent this violence. Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from 470,000 women in 50 countries informed our multivariate estimates. Our results show that one out of ten women aged 18-49 years old, experienced -at least once in their life time- sexual abuse, and most perpetrators are people in the environment of their victims. We also find that women educational attainment is a key factor in order to prevent sexual abuse, but gender equality achievements in economics, politics and health do not guarantee lower rates of sexual abuse. These results promote further discussions on strategies to strengthen effective preventive programs, especially for vulnerable women.

The present study examines a unique database of 724 individuals that informally look after cars parked in the streets. The study enriches our knowledge on the relationship between gender and the aggression exerted by these irregular workers on citizens. Employing a multivariate analysis, we find that men tend to commit acts of physical aggression more frequently than women, while women show greater verbal aggressiveness than men, when drivers underpay in this voluntary payment market. The results provided by the present study have implications to understand the dynamics in these understudied sectors and may be a valuable input for social policies. The findings may be useful also for other sectors with significant similarities, that is, those that work in the street doing different tasks in exchange for tips such as cleaning the windshields of the cars or juggling at the traffic lights. These results may shed light to the research and policy design in contexts where vulnerable workers strive for the informal ownership of a physical public space.

Latin America is the only region in the world where lethal violence increased in the first decade of the 21st century, and its citizens identified crime and violence as their main concern. Though p...

This paper documents the impact of an after-school program called Apoyo Escolar, sited in one of the most vulnerable neighborhoods of a developing country, Uruguay. The outcomes of interest are academic achievement, behavior at school and grade retention. By a field experiment, we explore the interaction effects of being randomly assigned to an after-school program with an indicator of parent commitment – an unaddressed question in previous literature. We found novel results that should guide policy design. Increasing time spent in safe settings does not guarantee academic success: the after-school program is effective in improving academic performance when children have committed parents. And students’ performance at school is highly correlated with parents’ educational expectations. Thus, the interaction between hope, family and after-school for disadvantaged children deserves more attention in policy design.

We study the impact of voluntary prices on the demand for plastic bags, using two years of administrative data from a national supermarket chain in Uruguay. We find that prices of US$ 0.07 and US$ 0.10 per unit decreased the number of bags used by its customers in the range of 70% to 85%. We also find that in anticipation of the price, customers increased the use of bags by up to 38% in some branches before its implementation. This result has strong implications for future studies, regarding the need to use long pre-periods. According to our data, short pre periods could bias upward the estimation of the effect of the prices by up to 41%. Finally, we do not find evidence consistent with the supermarket suffering a loss of sales, due to clients moving to stores not pricing the bags. The fact that the supermarket is a discount chain (clients are more price sensitive) and that it seems to have chosen the cities and towns in which it had more market share to rollout the prices, may inform policy makers about the conditions under which incomplete and moderate incentives may work.

Using a randomized trial, we evaluate the impact of Liceo Jubilar, a tuition-free private school providing middle school education to poor students in Montevideo, Uruguay. The research compares adolescents randomly selected to enter the school with those not drawn in the school lottery. Several features of this school — the capacity to select personnel, a culture of high expectations, a safe and disciplined environment, differential teaching, extended instructional time, strong parental involvement, and a rich offer of extracurricular activities — contrast with the country's highly centralized public education system. We find large positive impacts of Liceo Jubilar on students' promotion rates and academic expectations. Our results shed light on new approaches to education that may contribute to improve opportunities for disadvantaged adolescents in developing countries.

This paper presents a field experiment in which students received intensive and high quality face-to-face sessions combined with Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) that sought to foster healthy behavior. Students who were subject to the treatment (informative on-site sessions by experts and frequent reminders by several channels of social media) improved their knowledge on healthy habits relative to the control group. However, they were not able to translate it into healthier behavior, neither self-reported nor objectively measured by a physician. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which students have present-bias, lack of knowledge about the health production function, or are coping with complementary inputs, though it is possible to find other explanations.

Early childhood development is increasingly recognized as a key public issue. Parenting interventions form an important evidence-based strategy to foster infant-toddler cognitive and language skills, motor and socio-emotional development and adaptive behavior. This systematic review investigated the effectiveness of group-based parenting interventions focused on families with children about 0-2 years old, living in vulnerable populations. As well as children development assessments, parenting skills, attitudes and knowledge were examined as outcomes. A range of databases were systematically searched and randomized trials and quasi-experimental approaches included. Fourteen studies with 4,082 parents of babies and toddlers, in nine countries, reported findings which favored interventions on a range of parenting measures and children outcomes, though some studies show mixed results. There is a great heterogeneity in terms of the length of the intervention, the qualifications requires for the instructors and the program components that accompany the group intervention. Thus, it is crucial to assess the cost of each intervention to evaluate the feasibility of its implementation in a developing country with scarce resources. Most of the studies included lacked this cost analysis.

Optimism seems to foster the ability to manage adverse situations better - a finding especially relevant for disadvantaged populations. Employing a unique sample from a small underprivileged village, we study the association between spiritual practices and dispositional optimism. The village belongs to a developing country that is, by far, the most secular country in Latin America: this makes particularly interesting exploring the role of spiritual practices in this context. We find that spiritual practices are positively associated with higher optimism, measured by the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R): those who practice spirituality, score, on average, 14.4 percentage points higher on the LOT-R than those who do not. And this association seems to be especially robust in the case of the poor and less educated: those with spiritual practices score 20 percentage points higher on the LOT-R. Thus, the role that spiritual practices may play in dispositional optimism in disadvantaged populations deserves more attention.

Simultaneity bias complicates the estimation of the causal effect of motorcycle helmet usage on fatalities. We overcome this obstacle by exploiting an exogenous variation in the enforcement of the motorcycle helmet usage law between two municipalities in Uruguay. We show evidence of a dramatic increase in helmet usage in one municipality after the law was enforced. In just one month, usage increased from less than 10% to more than 90%. Our difference in difference estimates show that helmet usage laws are associated with a significant decrease in injuries and fatalities.

Data collected from the Uruguayan household survey (ENHA) of year 2006 is used to provide more evidence and revision on the longer-term impact of pre-primary education on subsequent school attendance and accumulated years of education. In order to control for unobserved individual or household characteristics that may affect both the participation in a preschool program and the later educational attainment, we instrumented preschool attendance with average attendance rates by age in each locality. Previous research found a positive effect both on school attendance and accumulated years of education, and this effect magnify as children grow up. But, till 2006 survey, there’s no accurate data available to calculate properly the accumulated years of education a child should have and so the causality between preschool and the outcome accumulated years of education was only approximated. Thus, a major contribution of this paper is that for the first time, ENHA makes possible to work with real data on school grade repetitions (estimate accurately the possible lag in children education) and we find results which are different to previous findings. In sum, though preschool impacts positively on subsequent school attendance, preschool seems not to have an increasing impact on years of education as children grow up if we take into account new data on grade repetition. Also this paper broaden the scope of previous research adding data on rural areas and taking into account also children who do not live with both biological parents. Spreading out preschool education seems to be a successful policy option in a country with large drop-out rates but to cope with school grade repetition new options should be studied.

In this paper, I review an issue that is an urgent challenge in the development field—the effectiveness of after-school programs for preventing school-age youth violence in vulnerable settings in Latin American and the Caribbean. These programs have proliferated in the region and include sports, recreation, music, tutoring, and other focused activities. Given their popularity and because they target known risk factors for violence (such as drop-out from school, poor academic performance, lack of motivation, too much idle time, low quality and quantity of adult supervision, and social isolation), it is critical to examine empirically whether they can be effective prevention strategies. Unfortunately, most rigorous trials of after-school interventions to prevent youth violence have been conducted in developed countries, with far fewer in Latin America. In this review, a broad range of databases was searched systematically. Only six studies in five Latin American and Caribbean countries were identified. Reported results indicate at least some benefits for youth behavior, although not across all youth. Additional concerns regarding how these programs are implemented and whether specific components can be tied to violence prevention are noted. The need for more rigorous evaluation of these programs is noted.

There has been little research on the association between behaviors, gender and usufruct rights in informal settings. Using a unique database from an underprivileged population, who informally look after cars parked in the streets, we analyze the behaviors women and men exhibit when they interact with other people in the street. We find that men tend to commit acts of physical aggression more than women when they have to defend their usufruct right. But, surprisingly, though theory and applied literature suggests the contrary, we found that women are more likely to react aggressively than men, when drivers underpay in this voluntary payment market. Building a Type Index of cuidacoches (indicator of attitude and external appearance), we explore association between aggressive behavior and this Type Index.

This is the first paper to analyze the effects of intense personal assistance on the compliance with labor regulation, within a population of deeply disadvantaged informal workers, using a field experiment. We randomly assign one-on-one assistance to these workers, and, within this treatment group, we randomly assign money to cover the cost of fulfilling the legal requirements to get a permit to work on the streets. One month after the intervention, we find that a worker who receives one-on-one assistance is three times more likely to comply with the legal documentation required by the government than a worker in the control group. We also find that a worker who receives both one-on-one assistance and cost coverage is four times more likely to comply with the legal requirements. The findings of this study shed light on strategies to help highly vulnerable workers to comply with labor regulations.

Spanish Abstract:Usando una base de datos inedita, creada a partir de cuestionarios administrados a una poblacion de contexto critico, este trabajo busca medir el impacto de un programa de prevencion de violencia adolescente a traves del deporte. Mediante una metodologia de diferencias en diferencias, exploramos asociaciones entre participar en el programa y habilidades no-cognitivas de jovenes altamente vulnerables. Encontramos evidencia de fuertes asociaciones positivas entre el programa e indicadores claves de resiliencia. Los adolescentes que participaron con mas intensidad del programa muestran una mayor probabilidad de desarrollar mejores aspiraciones (educativas, laborales, familiares), mayores indices de integracion social y de permanencia en el sector educativo formal, y menores transgresiones a la autoridad publica. Explotamos informacion cualitativa para estudiar los posibles mecanismos, y se destacan la ocupacion del tiempo libre, la practica asidua de habilidades no-cognitivas, y el coaching personal. Este trabajo arroja luz sobre estrategias prometedoras para aumentar la resiliencia y reinsercion social de jovenes altamente vulnerables provenientes de contextos criticos. English Abstract: Using an unprecedent database, created with questionnaires given to critical context population, this work seeks to measure the extent of a youth violent prevention program through sport activites. Using difference in difference methodology, we explore matches between being part of the program and non-cognitive abilities of high vulnerable young people. We found evidence of strong positive matches between the program and resilience key indicators. The young ones who get more engaged with the program, describe higher probability of having better aspirations (educational, labor, familiar), higher levels of social integration and permanency in formal education, and less offenses to public authority. We exploit qualitative information to studying possible mechanisms, standing out the use of free time, the frequent practice of non-cognitive abilities and personal couching. This work sheds lights about promising strategies for increasing the resilience and social integration in high vulnerability young people coming from critic contexts.

As the developed world has experienced a shift away from the traditional two-biological parent family, scholars have sought to understand how children are faring in non-traditional homes. Debate has arisen over assertions that children from non-traditional families do less well in school. Concerns about selection issues as well as a paucity of cross-cultural evidence, have led some scholars to question the influence of family structure on educational attainment. Using data from the 2006 Uruguayan household survey, we evaluated the relationship of family structure with children’s education using two different methods to deal with selection problems, an instrumental variables approach and propensity score matching. Both approaches yield evidence that growing up in non-traditional family structures seems to be negative related with the schooling of Uruguayan boys, with more muted results for girls. Interestingly, Uruguay is a developing country with two peculiarities, that is, a culture that experienced fairly rapid modernization in terms of institutions—including family transition—especially compared with other South American nations, and meanwhile an intriguingly high level of school drop-out, unusually high for Uruguay’s overall level of development.

There are a broad range of rehabilitation programs but results differ significantly among them, from positive to no-effect programs –and even to negative-effect programs. Hence, in order to guide policy, it is necessary to find out the features that should be present in programs for inmates to guarantee positive effects. We used a random assignment to evaluate an innovative rehabilitation program –rugby classes offered by players of the national team- for incarcerated offenders in an overcrowded prison in Uruguay. We find the program positively influences inmates’ behavior, lowering the consumption of drugs. Also, studying the mechanisms behind these findings, our results suggest that the program fosters healthier conduct and positive social attitudes. After studying the criminogenic attitudes addressed by this rugby program, we suggest lines for policy.

We run a randomized controlled trial with the aim of evaluating the effects of a health seminar complemented with weekly reminders on health outcomes. Our research design exploits the excess of applicants over the intervention capacity. In this 4-month intervention with undergraduate students, we provide information on preventive behaviors and healthy habits and on how to modify personal behaviors that could derive in chronical illnesses. We find that all students who were subject to the treatment improved their knowledge relative to the control group. But they were not able to translate it into healthier behaviors, neither self-reported nor objectively measured by a physician. We hypothesize that high discount rates, overconfidence and the lack of complementary inputs may explain our findings.

Spanish Abstract: El presente estudio se centra en comparar el comportamiento de los hombres respecto a las mujeres en tres variables claves para los logros educativos: el atraso escolar, la desercion del sistema formal y las tasas de culminacion de los distintos niveles educativos. Explotamos la existencia de datos representativos de toda la poblacion de Uruguay durante 24 anos (Encuesta Continua de Hogares: 1990-2013) y datos provenientes de la Encuesta Nacional a la Juventud y Adolescencia (2008). El foco esta en la adolescencia (de 13 a 18 anos), que es donde se concentran los indicadores de turbulencias en materia academica en America Latina. Nuestras mediciones muestran una brecha sistematica, con un signo persistente en todo el periodo: los adolescentes varones presentan mayores tasas de rezago y desercion, y menores tasas de culminacion del ciclo basico y bachillerato. English Abstract: The focus of the present study is to compare maleswith females in three key educational outcomes: dropout rates from formal education, education lag (in schooling years) and completion of different education levels. We utilize a datasetthat covers a period of 24 years (Continuous Household Survey: 1990- 2013) and a dataset with youth and adolescents’information for 2008 (National Survey of Youth and Adolescence: 2008). Both datasets are country representative. We make emphasis on adolescence (13-18 years old), a stagein which the worst educational outcomes are found in Latin America. Results show a significant gender gap, with a persistent sign through the period: male students present higher dropout rates, are left behind in schooling years and have lower rates of completion of Middle and High School.

This paper documents the impact of an after-school program called Apoyo Escolar, sited in the most vulnerable neighborhood of a developing country. The outcomes of interest are academic achievement, behavior in the classroom and grade repetition. We designed a field experiment exploiting the existence of oversubscription to the program. We found a novel result that should guide policy design for vulnerable children: increasing time spent in safe, supervised settings does not guarantee academic success. The after-school program is effective in improving academic performance when children have committed parents. This finding is crucial for policy because it is not be enough to merely take children off of the streets, parents’ commitment is needed. Interestingly, results show that students’ performance at school is highly correlated with parents’ educational expectations. This correlation fosters future research that may be designed specifically to explore the causal impact of expectations on educational attainment among disadvantaged children.

We study the three-year impact of a private tuition-free middle school on the academic outcomes of poor students. Several features of the treatment school fit with innovative paradigms that have delivered successful outcomes in poor urban areas. Our research design exploits the excess of applicants over the school capacity and the fact that participants were selected randomly. Specifically, we follow a cohort of students that entered middle school in 2010 and that were randomly assigned to attend the treatment school or public school as usual. We find that the treatment school impacted favorably on students’ academic advancement and math competencies. Also, the treatment school had a positive–and quite robust over timeimpact on students’ and their parents’ academic expectations. This culture of high expectations has been previously identified in the literature as a key input for school success.

We study the impact of high and low frequency incentives in a joint-liability framework on six academic outcomes of undergraduate students using a randomized field experiment. As recently documented in health literature, incentives to exercise are effective in developing healthy habits. Therefore, we design groups of three students and provide a premium to the homework’s grade if all the members of the group (three) meet some requirements. We investigate how the frequency of these take home tests affect the students study habits and thus, the academic outcomes. We find that there are no differences in the student’s educational outcomes between the high and low frequency groups. We also explore if male and female students respond differently to a joint-liability incentives scheme. We find that this treatment improves the accumulated grade average of male students, but not for females. This finding is in line with previous research on joint-liability and gender behavior, but now we present it in a new context. Finally, the paper outlines the main evaluation challenges associated with a field experiment in the classroom and provide some lessons in order to improve evaluation designs and to foster future randomized controlled trials in this area.

En América Latina, el debate acerca de los resultados heterogéneos en educación formal se ha centrado en las diferencias entre pobres y ricos. Este foco ha guidado a los diseñadores de política. Existen, sin embargo, otras profundas diferencias que reciben escasa o nula atención en la política pública de la región, entre ellas, la brecha educativa por género. El presente estudio se centra en comparar el comportamiento de los hombres respecto a las mujeres en tres variables claves para los logros educativos: el atraso escolar, la deserción del sistema formal y las tasas de culminación de los distintos niveles educativos. Explotamos la existencia de datos representativos de toda la población de Uruguay durante 24 años (Encuesta Continua de Hogares: 1990-2013) y datos provenientes de la Encuesta Nacional a la Juventud y Adolescencia (2008). El foco está en la adolescencia (de 13 a 18 años), que es donde se concentran los indicadores de turbulencias en materia académica en América Latina. Nuestras mediciones muestran una brecha sistemática, con un signo persistente en todo el período: los adolescentes varones presentan mayores tasas de rezago y deserción, y menores tasas de culminación del ciclo básico y bachillerato. Este hallazgo es robusto en los diferentes contextos de ingresos del hogar, ciudad de procedencia, ascendencia étnica, centro educativo público o privado, y estructura familiar. Y, llamativamente, la magnitud de esta brecha ha permanecido inalterada en todo el período considerado. El estudio analiza posibles explicaciones detrás de estos resultados, y finaliza obteniendo datos cualitativos mediante entrevistas a docentes de educación secundaria, que trabajan en centros educativos de diferentes contextos. La incapacidad de eliminar la brecha y la predominancia de la desmotivación como factor explicativo, constituyen un fuerte impulso para futuras investigaciones y una llamada de atención para el diseño de política educativa, reclamando la necesidad de tener en cuenta la singularidad del individuo por género.

Using a randomized trial, we evaluate the impact of a free privately-managed middle school in a poor neighborhood. The research compares over time adolescents randomly selected to enter Liceo-Jubilar and those that were not drawn in the lottery. Besides positive impacts on expectations, we find better educational outcomes in the treatment group relative to control subjects. The features of Liceo-Jubilar -autonomy of management, capacity for innovation, and adaptation to the context- contrast with the Uruguayan highly centralized and inflexible public education system. Our results shed light on new approaches to education that may contribute to improve opportunities for disadvantaged adolescents in developing countries. Unlike the experiences of charter schools in developed countries, Liceo-Jubilar does not have autonomy regarding the formal school curricula nor depends on public funding by any means.

We evaluate the impact of joint-liability incentives in the classroom using a randomized field experiment. The instructor designs groups of three students in the classroom and provides a premium to their homework's grade only if all three members of the group meet some requirements. To isolate the joint-liability effect from selfish motivations, we also design an individual incentives treatment. We find that joint-liability incentives impact positively on the grades attained in homework and midterm exams both in experimental courses and in other courses taken by the students in the semester. Though the average positive effect seems to disappear in final exams, the overall impact of joint-liability incentives on the academic achievements in the semester is still positive. A drawback of this program is a decrease in classmate satisfaction. The significant effectiveness of the peer monitoring developed by joint-liability incentives in a group provides novel implications for the design of grading policies in the classroom and for other social settings where incentives may be based in peer monitoring or joint liability.

Most discussion of after-school programs in shantytowns has centered on estimating mean impacts of programs, and results are not conclusive. Previous literature provides some explanations for these mixed results but this paper provides a new channel: the effectiveness of an after-school program on students depends on their parents’ type. One can argue that those parents who live in a shantytown may be there due to their bad type or because of bad luck (good type parents who are in a shantytown because they had bad luck in their lives but if they received an opportunity –such as an after-school program for their children- they would exploit it). The complementarities between after-school and parents’ good type are not obvious. Is a good policy to suggest responsible and committed parents to leave their children many hours a day in an after-school program? Would be better for those children to remain at home in contact with their committed parents? Should policy be directed to the children of bad type parents? By using random assignment to evaluate an after-school program in a developing country, we find that it is effective in raising children’s school achievement for those whose parents are of good type. Thus, this paper provides evidence that the knowledge of the distribution of impacts

As the developed world has experienced a shift away from the traditional two biological parent family, scholars have sought to understand how children are faring in non-traditional homes. Debate has arisen over assertions that children from nontraditional families do less well in school. Concerns about selection issues as well as a paucity of cross-cultural evidence, have led some scholars to question the causal influence of family structure on educational attainment. Using data from the 2006 Uruguayan household survey, we evaluate the influence of family structure on education using two different methods to deal with selection problems, an instrumental variables approach and propensity score matching. Both approaches yield evidence that growing up in non-traditional family structures has a negative causal impact on the schooling of Uruguayan boys, with more muted results for girls.

Although participation rates in the educational system might look impressive for a Latin American country, educational outputs are not that great. Uruguay is characterized by educational gaps and high drop-out rates in the secondary education. In our work we first explore the returns to schooling in Uruguay. In the course of our analysis, we use quantile regression models that are more suitable than ordinary least squares (OLS) for countries where heterogeneity within the labour force in terms of earnings and the impact of individual characteristics on earnings is significant. In particular we test the hypothesis of the existence of a degree premium for those individuals that complete the secondary education (12 years of education). As we find evidence that allows us to confirm the existence of the degree premium, we make conjectures and present a possible explanation that links the evidence between the existence of degree premium, educational gaps and dropouts. The rationale is that since only the completion of the secondary degree will generate a clear economic benefit, many individuals will exit the educational system as they find difficulties in the transit along the secondary level. In other words, the completion of the entire secondary stage might be seen as a long haul race and Uruguayan youngsters end up exiting the process when they are still far from the end. To cope with the estimation problem of unobservable household or children characteristics, this investigation employs an instrumental variable (IV) strategy both for two-stage least squares (TSLS) and quantile regression (QTE).

The happiness literature provides evidence on various factors, other than money, that do seem to contribute to individual happiness. As one explores the produced “happiness economics” literature, it is direct to understand the difficulty to find proper information on developing countries reality. In our analysis we investigate the relationship between income, family composition, health and religion over subjective well-being in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile and Uruguay). Specifically, we analyze data from the SABE survey a study conducted among people who are 60 years old or over, in various Latin American countries. Main obtained results show a positive correlation between higher levels of income and health,being married and the frequent religion practice and higher levels of subjective well-being. On the contrary, malnutrition has a negative impact on happiness indicators. In order to add robustness to our results and to deal with endogeneity issues, this paper uses different indicators of well-being, alternative estimation models such as a semiparametric one and a propensity score approach for the treatment of marriage.

In this paper we use household survey data to study the determinants of children’s educational achievement in Uruguay. As an indicator of this educational achievement, we build the “educational gap” which is the difference between expected years of schooling of a child and actual years of schooling. Among the determinants, we introduce indicators of family environment, focusing on the impact of the parents’ marital status on their children educational attainment. In particular, the results suggest positive influence of having married parents on daughter’s educational outcomes, after controlling for household background variables such as parents’ education, income per capita, wealth and number of children.

Se presentan los resultados obtenidos al través de la investigación cuantitativa y cualitativa sobre las actitudes ambientales en la población de los alumnos de la Maestría en Desarrollo Educativo de la UPN generación 2004-2006, se describe la base teórica ligada a las actitudes hacia la Educación Ambiental, así como la metodología empleada, se muestra que la población de profesores de este estudio, posee actitudes con tendencias favorables hacia conocer, informarse y entender la EA, con el objeto de insertarla en su práctica docente. Las actitudes son, por tanto, aprendidas y se inicia en su aprendizaje el seno familiar, las situaciones cotidianas pueden ser positivas o negativas; las pautas de socialización son importantes determinantes de las actitudes, por lo que es necesario que se impulse la equidad y las relaciones entre iguales, motivando la discusión, la confrontación y modificación de puntos de vista, la coordinación de intereses, la toma de decisiones colectivas, la ayuda mutua y la superación de conflictos mediante el diálogo y la cooperación, en donde la Educación Ambiental holística e interdisciplinaria se presenta como una opción para el cambio de actitud hacia la relación hombre-naturaleza.

Recently, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) published “State of World Population 2002” which holds a Malthusian view on demography: population growth harms economic development. Based on that assumption, the UNFPA directs funds to reduce the fertility of Third World women. The purpose of this paper is to question the arguments and the underlying assumptions of the UNFPA perspective on demography. The critiques of the Malthusian view, from an economic point of view, include: a) statistical data have not confirmed the Malthusians’ predictions; b) the difference between causation and correlation is misunderstood; c) a fixed level of resources is assumed; d) it underestimates the value of human capital; e) the problem of aging population is ignored. Since nowadays not only UNFPA but also many other institutions spent large amounts of money on reducing fertility rates and controlling population growth in the Third World, understanding the relationship between population and economic growth could help improve policies. The conclusion of this paper is that there’s no strong evidence, neither empirical nor theoretical, that population controls would solve poverty and contribute to development. Moreover, some evidence suggest just the contrary.