Andrés Ham

Quality of Life in Buenos Aires Neighborhoods: Hedonic Price Regressions and the Life Satisfaction Approach

This paper studies quality of life in urban neighborhoods in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. First, hedonic price regressions for residential prices are augmented with neighborhood characteristics, based on a real estate database with indicators on each property’s distance to public facilities and amenities, and on a smaller survey with greater detail. Second, following recent developments in the field of happiness research, the document assesses the importance of different neighborhood characteristics on quality of life by interacting objective and subjective indicators. Indices of quality of life related to local amenities are derived for the different neighborhoods for both the hedonic regression and life satisfaction approaches. The results indicate a strong but not perfect correlation between real estate prices, income levels and neighborhood characteristics, suggesting scope for welfare-improving policy interventions.

The Impact of Conditional Cash Transfers on Educational Inequality of Opportunity

Most conditional cash transfer evaluations have focused on estimating program effects on schooling, consumption, and labor supply. Fewer studies have addressed these outcomes using a distributive lens. This article uses data from three programs in Latin America to obtain evidence of their impact on educational inequality of opportunity, measured using primary enrollment. The main results indicate that groups considered vulnerable gain more in terms of access to education and that these interventions help level the playing field. They do not eliminate inequality of opportunity but are certainly a useful complement to equity-enhancing policies.

Information Policies and Higher Education Choices: Experimental Evidence from Colombia

This paper studies how providing information on the returns and financing of college affects higher education decisions. We conducted a randomized controlled trial in Bogota, Colombia, on a representative sample of 120 urban public high schools, 60 of which received a 35-minute informational talk delivered by local college graduates. We find no effects of the intervention on post-secondary enrollment rates. However, students in treated schools who do enroll chose more selective degrees. Students in treated schools also perform slightly better on the national exit exam. Since most individuals in our sample are from low-income families, and positive effects derive mostly from changes in behavior of students from better socioeconomic backgrounds, we conclude that informational policies to motivate the demand for higher education are less effective in contexts where credit constraints are sizable.

Can't Stop the One-Armed Bandits: The Effects of Access to Gambling on Crime

We study the effect of a large increase in access to gambling on crime by exploiting the expansion of video gambling terminals in Illinois since 2012. Even though video gambling was legalized by the State of Illinois, local municipalities were left with the decision whether to allow it within their jurisdiction. The City of Chicago does not allow video gambling, while many adjacent jurisdictions do. We take advantage of this setting along with detailed incident level data on crime for Chicago to examine the effect of access to gambling on crime. We use a difference-in-differences strategy that compares crime in areas that are closer to video gambling establishments with those that are further away along with the timing of video gambling adoption. We find that (i) access to gambling increases violent and property crimes; (ii) these are new crimes rather than displaced incidents; and (iii) the effects seem to be persistent in time.

Predicting school dropout with administrative data: new evidence from Guatemala and Honduras

ABSTRACT School dropout is a growing concern across Latin America because of its negative social and economic consequences. Identifying who is likely to drop out, and therefore could be targeted for interventions, is a well-studied prediction problem in countries with strong administrative data. In this paper, we use new data in Guatemala and Honduras to estimate some of the first dropout prediction models for lower-middle income countries. These models correctly identify 80% of sixth grade students who will drop out within the next year, performing better than other commonly used targeting approaches and as well as models used in the U.S.

Vulnerability to Poverty in Latin America - Empirical Evidence from Cross-Sectional Data and Robustness Analysis with Panel Data

This document presents a discussion of vulnerability estimates – defined as the risk of being poor in the future – in Latin American countries from both a conceptual and an empirical perspective, based on recent developments in the distributive literature. The document develops two main contributions. First, it presents cross-sectional vulnerability estimates (and their evolution over time) for 18 countries in the region, and compares their evolution with that of aggregate poverty rates. Second, based on longitudinal data for Argentina and Chile, the document carries out a validation exercise to assess how vulnerability measures fare as predictors of poverty at the aggregate and the micro levels, and compares their performance to that of other deprivation indicators. The main findings indicate substantial cross-country differences in vulnerability levels. Moreover, vulnerability measures provide good estimates of aggregate poverty trends. However, the validation exercise indicates that at the micro level there are sizeable misclassifications of households in terms of expected poverty. These results imply that vulnerability estimates should be complemented with information on shocks and aggregate trends for guiding focalised policy interventions.