In this paper, we perform a Tobit analysis of aid allocation, covering the period 1999-2002 and accounting for both altruistic and selfish donor motives. It turns out that poorer countries get clearly more aid from both bilateral and multilateral donors. Most donors are also found to direct significantly more aid to well-governed recipients if governance is measured by the World Bank's Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA). If the CPIA is replaced by the Kaufmann index on institutional conditions in recipient countries, however, the policy orientation of aid becomes extremely weak. In contrast to a recent paper by Dollar and Levin, our estimates do not suggest that multilateral aid is more poverty-and policy-oriented than bilateral aid. Post-conflict resolution emerges as a significant determinant of aid allocation in 2002. The importance of selfish aid motives clearly differs between bilateral and multilateral donors. In particular, the export-related self-interest of donor countries provided a fairly strong incentive to grant bilateral aid, as did colonial ties.

Latin American students consistently score low on international tests of cognitive skills. In the PISA 2012 results, students in seven Latin I. IntroductionIn a recent analysis of on economic growth in Latin America, Hanushek and Woessmann [2012] argue that growth rates have been low despite increases in average levels of schooling because students' cognitive skills are "truly dismal." They show that student scores on mathematics and science tests are considerably lower in Latin America than in other countries with similar levels of schooling, and they conclude that, "the average student seems to get much less learning, as depicted by the test scores, for each year of schooling than the average student in the rest of the world."It is natural to presume that if students in Latin America are not learning as much as students elsewhere, the teachers or the educational system must be at fault. But student learning is a function of activity both within and outside the school system. So the activity in the educational system may not be the whole cause, or even the most important cause of the low scores.Breton [2015] presents evidence that high average test scores in other parts of the world, especially in East Asia, are due in part to the extensive private tutoring that students receive to raise these scores. In addition, it has been known since Coleman [1966] that a student's test scores are substantially determined by the socioeconomic characteristics of the student's family. Since Latin American countries are characterized by an unusually high level of income inequality, with a large share of poor families, the low scores could be due to the low average socioeconomic characteristics of these families.Alternatively, the low scores could be a result of Latin American culture, which assigns less importance to student achievement on standardized tests than countries with Confucianbased cultures. The average level of schooling and the average scores on standardized tests are so uniform across Latin America that there may be an underlying cultural basis for these low scores.In this study we attempt to quantify the causes of the low average test scores in Latin America, using cross-country data from the PISA 2012 evaluation of student test scores. In this analysis we estimate the effects of a series of family and school characteristics on test scores in Latin America and compare them to their estimated effects in Scandinavia.There are many existing cross-country analyses of the effect of family and school characteristics on international test scores, which find that both types of characteristics affect student scores. But these analyses invariably assume that family and school characteristics have the same effect in every country (For example, [Woessmann, 2003]).

This paper argues that exogenous changes in household income alter the allocation of time within the family. To examine this issue, we propose a theoretical framework that is an extension of the unitary model of intra-household time allocation where conditional cash transfers are received by the household and we test it empirically using non-parametric techniques. This allows us to study the effects of an exogenous shock, such as a conditional cash transfer program, on time allocated to various activities such as work, domestic labor, leisure, and school for children and adults. Using the exogenous change of a conditional cash transfer program in Colombia, "Familias en Accion", we find significant positive effects on work time as well as on leisure and school for children and smaller effects on adult schooling and domestic labor, which support our hypothesis. These results are crucial to fully understand other direct and indirect effects of the program. JEL: D13, J22, C21

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. 1 Terms of use: Documents in AbstractIn recent years, Bolivia has experienced a series of economic and political transformations that have directly affected the labor markets, particularly the salaried urban sector. Real wages have shown strong increases across the distribution, while also presenting a decrease in inequality.Using an intertemporal decomposition approach, we find evidence that changes in demographic and labor market characteristics can explain only a small portion of the observed inequality decline. Instead, the results indicate that the decline in wage inequality was driven by the faster wage growth of usually low-paid jobs, and wage stagnation of jobs that require higher education or are in traditionally highly paid fields. While the evidence shows that the reduction in inequality is significant, we suggest that such an improvement might not be sustainable in the long run, since structural factors associated with productivity, such as workers' level of education, explain only a small portion of these wage changes.

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