Over the last ten years, the Peruvian conditional transfer program, Juntos, has expanded significantly. The objective of this program is to promote school attendance, reduce child labor, and monitor the growth and development of children in impoverished areas. Although improvements in these indicators have been appreciated, there may be unforeseen impacts on the households receiving the transfers. In this study, we focus on the program’s impact on the working hours of women in recipient households. According to the standard theory (Becker, 1965), transfers could reduce the labor supply by assuming leisure to be a normal good. According to theories of family economics, transfers to one member can affect the allocation of resources to all members of the household (Chiappori, 1992). The international empirical literature is inconclusive, pointing to non-existent, negative, and even positi...

Documento de trabajo; 471

Using a sample of weekly frequency of the stock and Forex markets returns series, we estimate a set of Markov-Switching-Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heterocedasticity (MS-GARCH) models to a set of Latin American countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru) with an approach based on both the Monte Carlo Expectation-Maximization (MCEM) and Monte Carlo Maximum Likelihood (MCML) algorithms. The estimates are compared with a standard GARCH, MS and other models. The results show that the volatility persistence is captured differently in the MS and MS-GARCH models. The estimated parameters with a standard GARCH model exacerbates the volatility in almost double compared to MS-GARCH model and a lower likelihood with the other model than MS-GARCH model. There is different behavior of the coefficients and the variance according the two regimes (high and low volatility) by each mod...