Latin America and Caribbean

The MD4SG Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) group aims to develop a new topical focus on issues relevant to the region. This semester’s focus will be on addressing challenges through a social cohesion and integration lens. Major themes include: migration (especially the Venezuelan diaspora) and education (leveraging technology to help students that were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic). We welcome members to join our upcoming bilingual (English and Spanish) meetings. Currently our capacity for new members is small due to the new nature of the group, but our goal is to grow throughout 2021, so please feel free to reach out to learn more about our schedule and how to get involved over the year.

Structure #

The main forum of discussion for these topics will be bi-weekly meetings of an hour in length. Each meeting will address a different topic (the list of which can be found on the website), and we expect members of the group to prepare short presentations on relevant papers to kick-start discussions for each meeting. In addition, for select topics we will also bring guest speakers who are experts in the field to share their work with us.

Topics / Selected Papers #

The following papers are examples of the types of paper we are thinking of reading together. We note that this list is not exhaustive, and we do not expect members to have read these papers prior to joining the group.

Migration #

The Venezuelan Refugee Crisis #

• Give Me Your Tired and Your Poor: Impact of a Large-Scale Amnesty Program for Undocumented Refugees. Dany Bahar, Ana Maria Ibanez, Sandra V. Rozo.
• Brothers or Invaders? How Crisis-Driven Migrants Shape Voting Behavior. Santa V. Rozo, Juan F. Vargas.
• Designing Information Provision Experiments. Haaland, Roth, Wohlfart.

EconCS / Optimisation Techniques for Refugee Integration #

• An Adaptive Targeted Field Experiment: Job Search Assistance for Refugees in Jordan. Alex Teytelbaum, Max Kasy, Stefano Caria, Grant Gordon, Simon Quinn and Soha Shami.
• Improving refugee integration through data-driven algorithmic assignment. Kirk Bansak, Jeremy Ferwerda, Jens Hainmueller, Andrea Dillon, Dominik Hangartner, Duncan Lawrence, Jeremy Weinstein.
• Stability and Pareto Optimality in Refugee Allocation Matchings. Haris Aziz, Jiayin Chen, Serge Gaspers, Zhaohong Sun.

Education #

Policies as Tools for Societal / Socioeconomic Integration #

• Acting Now to Protect the Human Capital of Our Children : The Costs of and Response to COVID-19 Pandemic’s Impact on the Education Sector in Latin America and the Caribbean. WORLD BANK 2021
• At a crossroads: Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ferreyra et al. 2017
• Harnessing the power of technology and digital innovation for children. UNICEF 2021

Working Group Organizers #

Working Group Members #