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This study investigates the impact of recent crises in Argentina (including the severe downturn of 2001-2002) on health and education outcomes. The identification strategy relies on both the inter-temporal and the cross-provincial co-variation between changes in regional GDP and outcomes by province. These results indicate significant and substantial effects of aggregate fluctuations on maternal and infant mortality and low birth weight, with countercyclical though not significant patterns for enrollment rates. Finally, provincial public expenditures on health and education are correlated with the incidence of low birth weight and school enrollment for teenagers, with worsening results associated with GDP declines.

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In this article, we present gsreg, a new automatic model-selection technique for cross-section, time-series, and panel-data regressions. Like other exhaustive search algorithms (for example, vselect), gsreg avoids characteristic path-dependence traps of standard approaches as well as backward-and forwardlooking approaches (like PcGets or relevant transformation of the inputs network approach). However, gsreg is the first code that 1) guarantees optimality with out-of-sample selection criteria; 2) allows residual testing for each alternative; and 3) provides (depending on user specifications) a full-information dataset with outcome statistics for every alternative model.

We study the behavior of female labor force participation (LFP) over the business cycle by estimating fixed effects models at the country and population-group level, using data from harmonized national household surveys of 18 Latin American countries in the period 1987-2014. We find that female LFP follows a countercyclical pattern-especially in the case of married, with children and vulnerable women-which suggests the existence of an inverse added-worker effect. We argue that this factor may have contributed to the deceleration in female labor supply in Latin America that took place in the 2000s, a decade of unusual high economic growth.

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

This article takes advantage of a new source of information, the 2006 Gallup World Poll, to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC with other regions in the world. The Gallup survey has the advantage of being conducted in over 130 nations with almost the same questionnaire; it stands as a complement to national household surveys for international comparison purposes. Our results confirm that Latin American countries are among the most unequal in the world, but we also find, considered as a single unit, Latin America is less unequal than other regions.

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