Latin America is seen as a highly discriminatory society. However, such a common belief appears not to be based on strong empirical evidence (Chong and Ñopo, 2007). This paper exploits novel experimental data gathered to identify the existence of discrimination in the labor market of Lima, Peru, a fast-growing country where much anecdotal evidence suggests the presence of discriminatory practices at many instances of daily life. Focusing on two dimensions, sex (female/male) and surnames (indigenous/white), we sent 4,820 fictitious and equivalent CVs in response to 1,205 real job vacancies advertised in an important Peruvian newspaper. We randomly allocated indigenous and white surnames across CVs sent in application to professional, technical, and unskilled jobs. Overall, we find that males receive 20 percent more callbacks than females, and whites receive 80 percent more calls than indigenous applicants. Within job categories, we find sexual discrimination only in unskilled jobs, while discrimination against indigenous is verified across all job categories. There are no statistically significant differences in the time to receive a phone call among male/female, and white/indigenous applicants.

The effective design and implementation of interventions that reduce vulnerability and poverty require a solid understanding of underlying poverty dynamics and associated behavioral responses. Stochastic and dynamic benefit streams can make it difficult for the poor to learn the value of such interventions to them. We explore how dynamic field experiments can help (i) intended beneficiaries to learn and understand these complicated benefit streams, and (ii) researchers to better understand how the poor respond to risk when faced with nonlinear welfare dynamics. We discuss and analyze dynamic risk valuation experiments in Morocco, Peru, and Kenya.Key Words: poverty, risk and uncertainty, dynamics, experiments, Kenya, Morocco, Peru Recent research in development economics has improved our theoretical conception of poverty and empirical methods for measuring it. As one significant improvement, economists now pay much greater attention to dynamic dimensions of poverty and vulnerability. This appreciation for asset and poverty dynamics and for the crucial intertemporal dimensions of poverty in rural agropastoral settings is manifest in both theoretical and empirical advances and is starting to influence policy in some settings.The effective design and implementation of interventions that reduce vulnerability and poverty require a solid understanding of underlying poverty dynamics and associated behavioral responses. When introducing insurance products or risk-reducing crops, for example, understanding how the target beneficiaries assess and value risk in the context of these underlying dynamics is critical. Of course, the success of these interventions hinges not only on our understanding as researchers of the underlying dynamics and behavioral responses but turns critically on how well

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We investigate the role of physical appearance, in addition to race and sex, in the rate of discrimination observed in the labour market of Lima. Our experimental design allows us to disentangle the effect of each of those three variables on the callback rates received by our fictitious job candidates. Since we are controlling for variables that are important in the selection process (mainly, education and job experience), our results provide better indicators of discrimination than the ones we could obtain through the econometric analysis of observational data. We find that discrimination based on looks is greater than that based on race or sex. The first two types of discrimination are in professional and unskilled jobs.

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