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While most countries are committed to increasing access to safe water and thereby reducing child mortality, there is little consensus on how to actually improve water services. One important proposal under discussion is whether to privatize water provision. In the 1990s Argentina embarked on one of the largest privatization campaigns in the world, including the privatization of local water companies covering approximately 30 percent of the country's municipalities. Using the variation in ownership of water provision across time and space generated by the privatization process, we find that child mortality fell 8 percent in the areas that privatized their water services and that the effect was largest (26 percent) in the poorest areas. We check the robustness of these estimates using cause-specific mortality. While privatization is associated with significant reductions in deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases, it is uncorrelated with deaths from causes unrelated to water conditions.

The article presents the details of a natural experiment of assigning land titles to squatters or unlawful occupants, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

The main motivation for prudential regulation is to increase the solvency of the banking sector. However, it is usually understood that tighter regulation also leads to more concentration and higher spreads. Thus, these prudential measures are seen as implying a trade-off between solvency and competition. In this paper we argue that this trade-off does not necessarily exist. We present a model in which tighter capital requirements lead banks to choose a lower degree of product differentiation, potentially inducing more intense competition and lower spreads. The model is motivated by the recent evolution of the Argentine banking sector.