This paper presents empirical results of a wide range of multidimensional poverty measures for: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico and Uruguay, for the period 1992-2006. Six dimensions are analysed: income, child attendance at school, education of the household head, sanitation, water and shelter. Over the study period, El Salvador, Brazil, Mexico and Chile experienced significant reductions of multidimensional poverty. In contrast, in urban Uruguay there was a small reduction in multidimensional poverty, while in urban Argentina the estimates did not change significantly. El Salvador, Brazil and Mexico together with rural areas of Chile display significantly higher and more simultaneous deprivations than urban areas of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. In all countries, access to proper sanitation and education of the household head are the highest contributors to overall multidimensional poverty.

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Communication is integral to organisations and yet field evidence on the relation between communication and worker productivity remains scarce. We argue that a core role of communication is to transmit information that helps co-workers do their job better. We build a simple model in which workers choose the amount of communication by trading off this benefit against the time cost incurred by the sender, and use it to derive a set of empirical predictions. We then exploit a natural experiment in an organisation where problems arrive and must be sequentially dealt with by two workers. For exogenous reasons, the first worker can sometimes communicate face-to-face with their colleague. Consistently with the predictions of our model we find that: (a) the second worker works faster (at the cost of the first worker having less time to deal with incoming problems) when face-to-face communication is possible, (b) this effect is stronger when the second worker is busier and for homogenous and closely-located teams, and (c) the (career) incentives of workers determine how much they communicate with their colleagues. We also find that workers partially internalise social outcomes in their communication decisions. Our findings illustrate how workers in teams adjust the amount of mutual communication to its costs and benefits.

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Este trabajo realiza un estudio comparativo del impacto de las remesas y la migración internacional sobre la pobreza y la desigualdad en cuatro países latinoamericanos con importantes procesos migratorios (Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua). A partir de encuestas de hogares se estiman los cambios producidos sobre estas dos dimensiones utilizando diferentes microsimulaciones. La metodología utilizada también permite descomponer los cambios totales en efectos directos e indirectos. Los cambios directos están relacionados con la salida del migrante del hogar y la sustitución de ingresos laborales por remesas. Los efectos indirectos (no observables) operan sobre el resto de los miembros del hogar y entre ellos se incluyen restricciones a la liquidez o cambios en las decisiones laborales. La incorporación de un doble mecanismo de selección muestral permite tener en cuenta arreglos intra-hogar que usualmente son excluidos del análisis empírico pero que han recibido fuerte soporte teórico en la literatura. Los resultados indican que en los cuatro países el proceso de migraciones y remesas reduce la desigualdad y en Ecuador, El Salvador y Honduras también se reducen significativamente las tasas de pobreza. La importancia relativa de los canales directos e indirectos depende entre otros factores de las características de los hogares involucrados en el proceso y el tipo de selección que opera sobre los mismos. En términos generales, la sustitución directa de ingreso laboral por remesas tiende a ser más importante cuando los hogares son más pobres mientras que los efectos indirectos se concentran en los hogares con ingresos medios.

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Firms allocate workers to clients to provide services. On the job, workers acquire skills that increase their client-specific productivity and therefore raise the probability that clients poach them. In this paper, we advance the understanding of this important, yet understudied feature of service industries. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that in order to mitigate poaching risk firms may forgo potential productivity gains by moving workers from one client to the other. Focusing on a security service-industry firm in Colombia, we find that an increase in client-specific experience increases both workers' productivity and probability that the workers are poached.After a policy change that forbids talent poaching, the firm sharply decreased the frequency of rotation, especially for workers who were more likely to be poached before the policy change. The theoretical model we propose is consistent with these empirical patterns and substantiates the broad applicability of the studied mechanism.