This paper investigates whether lowering the cost of divorce can reduce domestic violence. The cost of divorce influences the bargaining position of spouses, and thus, their behavior within the marriage. This study takes advantage of a large and unexpected reform of the divorce regime in Spain, which allowed for unilateral and no-fault divorce, and eliminated the pre-existing 1-year mandatory separation period, to estimate the causal effects. This reform dramatically reduced the cost of exiting a partnership for married couples, but not for unmarried ones, which favors a differencein-differences identification strategy. This study analyzes several measures of spousal conflict, ranging from self-reported spousal abuse and technical definitions of spousal violence based on recorded behavior, to more extreme measures of well-being such as partner homicide. Results suggest a decline of 27-36 percent in spousal conflict and around 30 percent in extreme partner violence as a consequence of the reform. Moreover, spousal violence has been found to decrease among couples who remain married after the legal modification, which suggests an important role for changes in bargaining within the marriage when divorce becomes a more credible (cheaper) option. The results are not driven by selection and are robust to a variety of checks.JEL Codes: D13, J12, J16, K36

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RESUMENEste artículo aporta evidencia sobre el empleo público en América Latina durante el periodo 1992-2012, explotando una base de datos estandarizados de las encuestas de hogares de todos los países de la región. Estas encuestas constituyen una buena herramienta por su representatividad nacional, su frecuencia y su amplia cobertura sobre cuestiones de empleo y salarios, tanto en el sector público como en el privado, formal e informal. El trabajo documenta y analiza los cambios en los niveles de empleo y salarios de los empleados públicos latinoamericanos vis-à-vis el resto de los trabajadores. ABSTRACTThis paper provides evidence about the public employment in Latin America during the period 1992-2012, exploiting a standardized database of household surveys from all the countries of the region. These surveys constitute a useful tool because of their national representativeness, their frequency, and their wide coverage about employment and wage issues, both in the public sector as in the private, formal and

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We study whether opportunities to extract rents in a job affect the type of individuals who are attracted to it in terms of their underlying integrity. We do so in a laboratory experiment in which participants choose between two contracts that involve different tasks. We experimentally introduce the possibility of graft in one of them and study the sorting of subjects across contracts based on an incentivized measure of honesty. We find that the corruptible contract changes the composition of subjects because it attracts the most dishonest individuals and repels the most honest ones. In addition, we observe extensive graft when the opportunity is available. We introduce a double randomization strategy to disentangle the extent of which stealing responds to the aforementioned negative selection or to pure incentives (net of selection). We find that, in this setting, selection is the main driver of graft. Our results have clear policy implications to curb corruption.